Well all I can say is you guys are braver than me in having your raw archive sitting on drives.
Good luck to all that do it and enjoy carting you drives and or laptops around the place...don't drop them...and enjoy your impossible to edit in full preview, realtime AVCHD codec's on your computers if you :
Wags
I am with Drew and Craig on this one.
I had a multi camera shoot using Panasonic HVX200 and made sure ahead of time that (a) the cameras were appropriate to be used for what was being shot and what was intended and (b) that the things that were needed were available.
Bought a laptop along and made sure all computers that were going to be used in post had the proper/recent version of Final Cut, not one that was kind of outdated. Read up on any potential "gotchas" and purchased enough hard drives (with some overage as needed) for intial downloads and back-ups based on reading what the space requirements were. Hooked up an RTX to RAID 1 to duplicate on initial downloads immediately and it was fine. (Then used the RTX to make a duplicate for storage for another location.) Of course this was not a field type setting as on a dive trip, but goes more to the article. Work flow was alot easier than tape, processing of clips was pretty much automatic and easier than pulling tapes in and out, etc.
As to the article on dv.com, like Drew said, it seems perhaps they were not fully up to speed., I am not sure when it was written, but since it refers to a prior article from September, 2007, probably it was no earlier than that date 
FWIW Final Cut Studio 2 was released in April, 2007 (I assume they meant in the article they were using Final Cut Studio [1],it was not even clear if they were running the Universal Binary version of the Studio, though I am asumming they were.) Not to nitpick, but if there is going to be discussions of workflow issues and problems some of these details would help.
Anyway, it does not seem they used the proper tools available to them at the time, including a tower set up for a feature film. From the pictures in the article it looks like they had a real place to set up equipment and were not trying to do this all by running a power cord out to a beach or remote island. "Data wrangling" for me took a couple of minutes. With all the cards they had, I would doubt they would shoot without breaks. Would take less than a couple of minutes to start the transfer process. To hire someone to put the cards in and undertake the transfer probably would not have cost too much.
As to the issue of storage and what will happen 10-15 years from now, who knows. There is just as much chance that tape and mechanisms to play them back can be difficult to find, much like trying to buy a roll of film nowadays. Things change and it was not too long ago that Zip and Jaz drives were the be all end all and that the "holy grail" 1 Megapixel still camera was actually released. I have DV, mini-DV, Hi-8 and etc. And the video is all on hard drives ready to move over to the next storage medium that is here. It is the nature of the beast and 10 years from now it will probably be more difficult to get the source off the tapes than transfering files. Who knows, 5 years from now there will be 500 Gig CF flash cards for $100 and I can store a ton of things in the physical space of one hard drive.
Anyway it took about 20-23 minutes to transfer a 32 Gig as far as I recall. This was via a FW800 port out to the RTX. Do not have the P2 cards, but have the raw files and just went back (slow Sunday 
) to the files straight from the files on the eSata drive. It took under 10 minutes to have the raw P2 files (30+ minutes worth) ready to go for output on my tower. I did a rough and dirty workflow and the whole time to get 30 minutes in and out to a m2v and AC3 file for DVD took less than an hour, maybe it would be 8-10 hours per hour of footage if I was on my laptop and may try that later, but my guess it would less than that (And I have a two year old laptop. Newer laptops are faster and if I was shooting like they were I would do a bit of checking and would probably get a new laptop for any increase in peformance.) In other words portions of the article would similar to me saying that I ran into problems using Edius 4 a laptop while Edius 6 and a Tower would be really what should be used.
As to the tape/HD issue, I probably have had more tapes go bad/get caught in heads than actual HD failure. There was one brand of HDs that I had a problem with (all purchased around the same time from same manufacturer) and it came out later that the drives had issues in general. Otherwise have been pretty darn solid except for a loose FW connection on one. And I really do not "baby" my hard drives and often can be a bit harsh with them in fact.
When traveling (dive trips) they get tossed in and out of bags, bounced around and the rest (though I do not fling them in a back of a pick-up and go into the balzing sun, I think you said that was one of your failures in another post at some point ) Have dropped them and my laptops have gotten banged around and they keep on working (of course the computers are Macs )
Having two (or even three) very portable hard drives seem to be easier than carrying a bunch of tapes for me, though my underwater camera is tape. It is often more difficult to find room for a stack of tapes for a 2 week trip than a place to slip in a couple of hard drives and a stack of CF cards.
No system is perfect and everyone will have their own preferences and needs. That being said, I am pretty sure though my next video set up will record to hard drive format ... that Scarlet does look like it will be cool
But as Drew said, horses for courses - if you are going to shoot something, whatever camera, know what to expect and how it will work beforehand, which includes time frames for delivery. It is all always a give and take.
And you may want to dump an extra copy of your footage onto hard drives just in case 
