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Re: [OM] HDDs & BU [was OT - new monitor setup]

Subject: Re: [OM] HDDs & BU [was OT - new monitor setup]
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:20:58 -0800
Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> Moose and I are happily using these devices.
> <http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153071&cm_re=blacx_dock-_-17-153-071-_-Product>
> Just drop a bare drive into the top.  It can take 2-1/2 or 3-1/2 SATA drives 
> and (depending on the model) will attach via eSATA and/or USB.
>   

Yup. Still happy with that solution.

Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> But hard drives are dramatically cheaper.
>   

External HDs are not only much cheaper, I think they are superior. 
Recordable CDs and DVDs have proved not to be reliable even over the 
fairly short run. The versions with Mitsui patented dyes and gold 
reflective layers test as reliable for at least decades, in return for 
premium prices. But that's guesswork based on accelerated aging testing. 
There's no way to know if some component will unexpectedly fail due to 
some aging or environmental factor not anticipated in the testing.

I'm pretty sure nobody knows the archival qualities of writable BDs 
(Blu-Rays) at all. By the way, did you know there are four versions of 
writable BD? Gotta get the right ones for the writer you get.

I know, there are plenty of experiences with HDs failing, but that is in 
regular use. Consider my image back-up setup. I bought matched 1.5TB 
drives. One lives inside the computer, the other in a case on a 
bookshelf. The active one has racked up 6344 hours of use, the BU drive, 
51 hours. A typical BU session involves the drive being on for less than 
10 min. The likelihood of that drive failing from use before it becomes 
functionally obsolete is almost infinitesimal. The chances of both 
drives failing before the first failure can be replaced is even smaller.

In a practical world of technical obsolescence, HDs used this way are 
much more reliable than any non-gold optical media and at least as 
reliable as the gold media. The truth is that no matter what medium you 
use, it will become obsolete before the images on it do, and with luck 
before the media fail. Then you will have to copy the data onto the 
"next great thing".

There are other compelling reasons to use HDs. I currently have about 
1TB of images. In optical storage terms, that's about:
1,430 CDs
227 DVDs
40 BDs

Add 50% to that when the current drives are full.

So what's my time and effort worth in maintaining some kind of index of 
what's on which disk. I recently changed the increasingly unwieldy 
directory of my image disk. It's much better now for day to day work. 
With stacks of hundreds of CDs and DVDs, the record keeping to map new 
structure to old BU disks would have been a nightmare.

All I had to do to keep the BU in sync was either erase it and recopy 
the original or do the same reorganization on it. I chose the latter, 
just in case, then ran a folder comparison app against the two. I found 
some redundancy on the BU, due to small folder changes in the past and a 
folder missing on the original. How I managed that, I don't know, but it 
was easy to catch and correct using HDs. It feels good to know that 
nothing is either unique or redundantly copied between the two disks. 
Skip something inadvertently on a BU to optical disk and I may never 
know until I need it - and it isn't there.

And what about copying to the next storage device? Anybody feel like 
sitting down feeding hundreds of optical disks into drives for hours and 
hours. With a HD, it's just one copy operation.

I sure like the iddea of some sort of physically eternal storage medium, 
but there's no such thing. In the meantime, HDs are both least expensive 
and best.

H. D. Moose
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