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Time to Purchase a DVD-R?
Evanrude asks: "With DVD writers having significantly come down in price over the past year more companies are coming out with their version of the DVD-R. My company has a large file archive of documents and data that don't necessarily need to be stored on read/write media, but need to be kept online. I want to accomplish this with online DVD storage but is this the right way to go? Who has the best value with the most features of all the DVD-R's on the market? What are some things to look for and things to avoid when purchasing a DVD-R? Is it even time to purchase one, or should I wait another six months?"
I'd recommend MWave -- They have really good hardware prices. I searched for DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM and found a good many products in there. Some for even under $300. Definitely worth a look. =)
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
I've just been thinking the same thing. Unfortunately, there are a couple of competing standards out there now: DVD-RAM, DVD-RW and DVD+RW. The first, DVD-RAM, seems to have no future that I can see, and is apparantly a superclass for several different standards. Apple's DVD writers are the second kind and probably have the largest installed base. But it looks like the big players are going for the third ("+"). In addition, one of the -RW format's big supporters was Compaq and HP supports +RW. I'm assuming that Compaq will switch camps, leaving Apple more or less isolated. That has me leaning toward +RW.
One thing to watch out for -- the "first generation" of +RW drives can't handle write-once media. They're RW only, and the disks are more expensive. HP, for one, is releasing a second-generation writer (maybe called the 200i?) this month, that can do the write-once archival thing.
If I really needed it now, I'd go for a newer +RW format. But it would probably be less risky to wait 6-12 months to see how things shake out.
Kill, Tux, kill!
The cheapest 4.7G dvd drive from pricewatch is $36 which is $7.66/gig. A 60 gig hard drive is only $69 which works out to be $1.15/gig. There just isn't any reason to use DVD for online storage when hard drive space is so cheap. The software raid driver in linux makes these large arrays easy with a trivial amount of hardware behind it.
Why would you ever bother putting a large amount of data on DVD? Espically when it needs to be accessable from the internet. You are going to end up spending a lot of money on the DVD media ($20 a pop i believe?) and then you need to buy an equal number of dvd drives to be able to access all the data. You will likely need more then one writer to be efficient with the entire process, too.
A 80gb IDE drive costs less then $100, and holds more then 5 DVDs. If you need speed, go SCSI, it'll end up costing as much as the opticial solution and be easier to manage. But really, optical media has been obsoleted by todays harddrive sizes. If it needs to be portable, then there might be a reason to go for it, but even then you should look at removable harddrives.
I work for a newspaper where we have just completed a cost comparison for CD based systems to DVD based systems. We have a large Image archive that was outgrowing our second 100 CD jukebox. Our quandry, should the new Jukebox be DVD or CD based.
4.1GB per disc (with double sided support not looking promising...) at 100 DVDs = 411 GB storage
100 CDs = 65GB storage. (roughly)
Our first look was at the costs associated. The Price difference between a DVD Jukebox and a CD jukebox was not insignificant, but was not a breaker. The writers have come down in price, and the Media is expensive, but not prohibitively so. So, from a simple cost perspective, the system was feasable.
However, when working with provided demo models, we found a 25% CHANCE OF BURNING A COASTER, with the write times being ridiculously slow. We then recalculated for the extra media expense and extended staffing. (The admin would need to keep a longer watch less often, but the CDs could be burned during the BU guys shift, now they will go past.)
With the addition of two hours employee time and planning for the purchase of 10% more media, the costs of DVD were slightly more. Then the vendor called, the DVD jukebox requires new switching Software that runs some $5,000.00.
So, we looked for used CD jukeboxes, found one for almost 1/2 the price of the hardware alone, and it still works with our old software.
Now, we did all of these calculations based on price per MB, and condidering the the DVD system has 7x the storage space, that also means it is 7x the cost. I feel confident that when we revisit this upgrade in 2 years the prices will be dramatically lower and the quality will be better. I still think you can't beat a $50 CDR and 0.20 media costs.
Unless you work for a company that enjoys having the latest and greatest (OOOH! I can access the SAN from my PocketPC with wireless.) I think you'd be better off sticking with the tried and true methods, wait for the writing SW to get more stable and wait for the standards to crystalize.
01 - That's my two bits
01110110 - That's the Byte I took out of "Crime"
Hammy
If you do go the DVD route, watch out for:
Running out of discs (these things go faster than you think)
Jammed discs
Depending on the client software, inane Windows error messages - quite a few programs don't know how to handle waiting for a disk to move into an active drive.
...and if you don't use Windows, well... lucky you. Just my experiences - everyone else's will undoubtedly vary.
Magnetic damage to CD's DVD's?? Hunh?? No, you HD is vulnerable to Magnetic damage because it is a magnetic storage medium.
The material that "holds" the data in most audio CD's is usually aluminum, and the way that the data is stored is through "pits" or tiny holes in the media. Other types of CD's use dye layers to
"expose" these pits, and still others use gold and other substrates to hold the data. As such, most CD's are basically immune to magnetic fields unless they are *extremely* powerful. There are
other types of CD's that do use magnetics (the Magneto-Optical CD for one) that could theoretically be affected, but it would need a
far higher strength magnetic field for a long period of time than you would probably have. It is improbable that you would come into
contact with these media in a music library (unless perhaps they are CD master pressings which are used to actually make the CD's at the
factory).
I have no Idea what you think a "True History" wold be on a non write once media type. Do you mean like a Journal in a File System?? Not needed due to the unchanging nature of the write once media. History as far as backups?? Well, write once means it can't be overwritten, so properly stored it could concievably hold the history of a file system much better than a Tape backup that gets overwritten every third week.
DVDr is great for archives that do not need to be accessed often, and are more convenient that using 7 CD's for the same purpose. Law and Real Estate firms can use them for storing scanned contracts, Graphic Artists can use them for storing large layouts, or an entire portfolio.
Goes to prove, don't believe everything you read on Slashdot.
Hammy
For data that has to be online but is not accessed by anyone and needs to be read only, a dvd drive *is* the cheaper solution. The cost of a 200 disc dual drive firewire dvd changer sits around $1500 (and they could be cheaper, this was the first price I found . . I don't remember the exact size of a dvd, but its somewhere around 4gig. 4*200=800. To get 800 gig out of hard drives, you'd need at least 6 160gig eide drives which would cost you about $225 each. This is $1300, and you'd have to get one of those 3 channel eide raid controllers . ..thats another 100 bucks. So, I either have fast access for lots of files I don't need fast access for, or for the same price I get something that I can make very cheap duplicates of to keep off site.
You'll also need another DVD drive for each 5-10GB of data, if using DVD's
That's silly. A jukebox only requires one DVD drive for X number of DVDs, depending on your requirements X could be as large as 400 - that's the size of the largest consumer DVD *movie* jukebox - a Kenwood something or another.
As for data jukeboxes, take a look at the Powerfile C200 Studio which is $1000 MSRP (not street) for 200 DVDs. With blank DVDs runing about $1.25 in quantities of 100 that puts you at no more than $1250 for 940GB of online data and probably closer to $1K if you buy from a discount hardware place.
The equivalent space in hard disks is going to run you more than that - according to pricewatch, the cheapest 120GB is $136 for the IBM models. Ignoring the reliability questions regarding recent IBM hard disks, that puts you at about $1100 just for the drives alone, you are looking at another $500 or so for an IDE controller that will handle 8 drives (3ware escalade 7850) plus you then need some sort of case to hold the drives and the computer in one since IDE cables aren't suppossed to get much longer than 18".
So, at least $1700 for an equivalent disk-based system, without redundancy. The DVD approach will give you a full mirror in offline storage for another $250 but to put redundancy into the hard disk system you are going to need either raid-5 or mirroring - both of which will significantly push up the price because 8 drives is the limit for a 3ware controller so you could go with larger disks (160GB) but they are about 180% the price of the 120GB drives or you could go to two more controllers controller and maybe five 120GB drives per controller which is going to be another $500 for the 2nd controller and another $270 for the extra drives pushing the total up to $2500 or so for the cheapest raid-5 system.
Sure, online storage of a disk array is going to be a whole lot faster than near-line storage of a DVD jukebox, but the guy who asked the original question only needs near-line speeds and the price with DVDs is a about half that for sizes around 1TB.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
I've had a DVD-R for nearly six months and after having used it, I think it's a technology that's best suited for a few things (IMO, of course):
If I were in your situation, I'd go for a large drive -- 120GB drives are around $200, last I checked, which is a steal. Plus it's faster and generally less hassle. DVD blanks are at a minimum $5, but usually more expensive (RWs definitely are, I think Rs are around $5)
Alternatively, if you're looking for portable but large-volume storage, I'd definitely consider a firewire drive. (and depending on your needs, this is an excellent opportunity to justify the iPod purchase... ;) )
Recordable DVDs seem to be most convenient as a large-scale archiving medium; smaller stuff can go by the 'net or CD-R.
I am not Herbert.
I just finished costing out a 3-petabyte database for a NASA project, and by far the cheapest way to back up data is to write them to hard drives, unplug the hard drives, and stick them in the closet. It's not an archival solution but archival media cost so much more and are so small compared to hard drives, it's ridiculous. For archival stuff we're holding out to see whether Blu-Ray takes off.
I had to take the plunge due to my having many GB's of digicam generated photos. My DLT backups were just using too many tapes.
Some random thoughts:
The second generation DVD+RW drives are just coming out. The only one availasble is the HP 200i. Here's an overview of the 2nd gen drives, and here's an overview of the 1st gen drives.
The 2nd generation drives support DVD+R, many of the 1st do not.
TheNerds.net have the best media prices. I looked a lot and could find no better.
The HP drive, which I bought, comes with "drive letter access" software. Basically, a packet writer so you can just use the Windows explorer (yes, where I use the drive) to drag and drop files onto it. I have the suspicion that my McAfee VirusScan 4.5.1 stopped working when I installed the HP software. McAfee has not been able to figure out why their software is not working (service error 5011, which is a timeout of some sort).
I've been trying to author some DVD's, and I had good luck playing my DVD+RW's in my DVD player. I used a trial of Uleads DVD Workshop.
I held off until the 2nd gen drives were available, and was forced to purchase the HP because it's the only one out. I would have prefered the Philips DVDRW228 over the HP, but no one has the Philips drive in stock, that I could find.
So far, I'm happy, and I'm hoping HP will update their drivers and VirusScan will start working again.
I also have been looking hard at DVD-R/+R as a backup solution, but two things worry me greatly.
#1. I want to be able to access this material 5-10 years from now. With CD-R's, if you want to protect your data we now know that you are best off with Tayio Yuden or Kodak. With DVD mediums though . . . no one has any clue what the real life on these discs are, especially since most are apparently using a different dye then CD-R's do (if you've never seen a DVD-R, on most the bottom is a light blood red).
#2. Cost. CD-R's are pretty much the cheapest backup medium now. DVD-R's are still fairly expensive, but the third option is what intrigues me. IDE drives are easily available now for $1/gig. A hot swappable IDE drive bay from Vantec runs you about $40 retail. I have seriously considered just buying IDE drives for backup, and using the hot swappable bay to change them. Much easier, much faster. What makes me nervous about this is the 'all your eggs in one basket' problem, but from my experience with hard drives, if they survive the initial part of their 'bathtub' failure cure, they are good for years.
There are really three seperate categories you get into once you're considering moving data from primary storage. You seem to be asking about the first, but I'll cover all three for completeness.
Near-line (a.k.a secondary storage)
Primary storage almost always consists of the fastest hard drives directly attached to your data source (file server, SAN, workstation, whatever). Historically, near-line has been some medium where the end-user could access the data required in the same manner as primary storage, but at a slower rate. The old solution used to be either a different server using older/slower disks, or an RW optical jukebox. Near-line storage almost always is very high read-usage, but the occasional write isn't unlikely, so you generally want a media that can support writes.
Backups (a.k.a. save-your-ass storage)
Backups are a place to temporarily save data in case of an emergency. The criteria generally don't include re-writability, but do concern with ease-of-access in the case of a recovery. In addition, Backups expire - after a certain period of time, the data is no longer available. Tape has been the choice for this for a long time, with it's high storage capacity and low cost. Higher-end solutions have been the "on-line snapshot" capabilities of SAN and NAS devices (essentially to make a static mirror of data on extra storage space). CD-R and even floppies have been popular for the low-end. Whatever the choice is, the main concern is reliability, and the ability to backup the data within a set time window.
Archival (a.k.a save it for the history books)
This is a big one, and one frequently misunderstood. The two major criteria for Archival purposes are Survivability, and Retrievability. That is, the solution has to make sure it does NOT degrade with time (i.e. it doesn't introduce errors after sitting on the shelf for 20 years) and that you will realistically have a method to retrieve the data over it's lifetime (e.g. are they still going to have devices that can read your data media in 30 years?) Magnetic tape is a BAD THING for Archival purposes, despite its common usage. It fails on both tests. Mastered CDs (NOT CD-R) and Optical Disks are generally the preferred method here.
In the modern world, I would recommend a backup server using RAIDed IDE drives for Near-line these days. The relative cheapness of IDE drives, combined with the newer IDE RAID cards provides an unbeatable cost/storage/reliability ratio (far superior to CD, DVD, Tape, or Optical Disk), and it's by far the easiest to maintain and use, since it's simply another fileserver. Don't scrimp, however. A good one of these should probably run $3-$4k with 8-10 100GB drives, redundant power supply, and hardware RAID.
Backups are a bit more complex, and the variables make a one-size-fits-all recommendation unrealistic. And you didn't ask for that anyway, so I'm not going to make one. :-)
Archival really means you want to keep (or are required to keep) the data around, but don't need access to it much. If you don't intend to keep the data for more than 15-20 years, you can probably get away with CD-R. Otherwise, look into having your data pressed onto CD (i.e. real mastered CDs). They last a good 100 years or so, and it's relatively cheap. In either case, you want multiple copies of each disc, and the good-old CD-jukebox is your friend.
As you imply (and other posters have noted), DVD-R/RAM/RW/+RW isn't quite stabilized yet. Despite their larger capacity, I wouldn't change the above recommendations, other than replacing CDs with DVD when it settles down - DVD mastering isn't anywhere as cheap as CD mastering is (and if you do master DVDs, make sure that you specify UNENCRYPTED DVD so you don't get CSS put on accidentally).
As a side note: there's a whole industry built around Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) which deals with automatically moving data between the various storage levels, and recovering it as need be. It's a bit beyond what you describe you're looking for, but look at one of the big UNIX storage players' (Sun, HP, IBM, EMC) site for a whitepaper on it. They're a good read for concepts which you can apply, even if you're not using their multi-million-dollar hardware/software packages.
Best of luck.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Hard drives on the other hand are very cost effective:
Under 1TB $1000-$1500
1-10 TB $4,500-$45,000 10+ TB $45,000+ Since you are looking at optical you are probably looking for a system in the 1 TB range. For this I would recommend a single UltraTrak. The purchase price will be a fraction of what a optical library would cost, the reliability will be better, and the maintenance will be cheaper. Maintenance of these things is very simple: when a drive fails the alarm goes off. Buy a new drive and put it in. That's it!Optical may not look that bad when you look at the purchase price and the idea of a robot is cool but you also have to look at the cost of maintaining a machine like that in terms of time and money. When you add it all up, hard drives win every time.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
DV-R is nice to keep stuff in archive off site, but even with the current price of about $5 for a blank, it will take you $75 of blanks (15 DV-Rs each having 4 gb each) to get the amount of storage that you would get on a 60 gb drive for the same price. Faster access, less time to create the media, etc. Put it in one of the cheap 3.5 inch firewire enclosures, and it will even take up less space than 15 DV-Rs.
Personally, the solution I have gone for is to put together a 1/2 terabyte server on my network. For the cost of $80 for a case, $80 for a motherboard, $80 for a cpu chip, $80 for memory, $640 for 8 60 gb disk drives (at $80 ea), and $80 bucks for 2 more ide controllers, you can get a ~1/2 terabyte server for $1040. Run a Linux and put up Samba and Appleshare for free. Super high performance, not. But enough to do storage of infrequently used files and backup space.
Yyour right "fix" wouldnt work for the following reasons:
You can decide if its a CD-R by reading out the so called ATIP-field where the manufacturer of the CD-R and other things are recorded. Pressed CDs are lacking this field, and you can only read it with a CD-burner, not with CD-ROM readers.
Some protections (like Safedisc2) even check for it. The problem is: CloneCD, the #1 software used to make copies comes with a small program for your systray which prevents the copy protection from getting the ATIP-field data. So copy-protection is back to square one as usual.
Seriously, there's still some catchin-up to do with software. It's like in the early days of CD-ROM burners, where it took *skill* to make a good disk.
And it takes a l-o-n-g time to transcode video from, say, Video Camera format to DVD MPEG2 format. Be prepared to have your PC crank for the better part of an afternoon.
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
Unless you want to make video DVDs, don't buy one (at least not yet). Not only are the drives quite expensive, but the disks are also more expensive (per MB) than CD-Rs. Buy a good CDRW drive (DVD recorders are not very good at recording CDs).
And 4.3 GB really aren't a lot. It's not even enough to store one hour of DV video (13 GB).
In a few months or a year you will have a) much cheaper DVD-Rs and b) new optical discs, likely to be over 10 times bigger than DVD-Rs.
On the other hand, if you do want to make video DVDs, make sure you buy a drive that will record in a format compatible with most readers. Mine is a Pioneer (DVR-A03) and so far all discs have worked fine in all set-top players I have tried. From what I've heard, DVD-RW and DVD+RW have problems with a lot of players (especially old ones, but also some recent models). There is a nice list of formats and players here:
VCD Help DVD players compatibility list
Also, most "consumer" DVD authoring programs are crap. Be ready to pay at least an extra 1000 dollars / euros on software if you want to be able to do any interesting stuff like multiple audio tracks, animated menus, etc..
To do the MPEG-2 encoding, I use TMPGEnc (slow but has the best quality, IMO). I wrote a small guide that you can find here.
RMN
~~~
Buy a Mac, it WILL make things easier for you.
The SuperDrive burns every format *I* would ever need, and either iDVD (for low-end, or consumer) or DVD Studio Pro (pro) will make your DVD-burning life a lot easier for movie DVDs..
For data DVDs, OS X will burn 'em for you right in the Finder, no other app needed!
(Toast Titanium also works great for this)
That's it, that's all.
A number of folks here are claiming DVD-R blanks are $5 each.
I've been buying them from esbuy.com, for about $1.20 each.
If you search pricewatch.com, you can find the DVR-104 (OEM version of DVR-A04) Pioneer drive for $260.
The burn speeds are decent (beats DVD-RAM!), and it's compatible with (nearly all) DVD Video players that are less than a year old.
For what you want, you'd be MUCH better off with a SAN and some sort of silo. DVD's have a tendency to grow feet. Security wise, I'd never do a DVD jukebox. It's too easy for stuff to go bye bye. The san can be backed up by a IBM silo running Tivoli or a StorageTek unit or something similar. For those who say that tape technology has not kept up, you can tell they are PC centric and never look beyond it. I have Magstar tapes that are 7 gigs uncompressed and a library that holds tons of them (around 100-200 at least...if not more). Also, I would rather not have 2 TB tapes. Too easy for you to loose something if it's only on one tape (of course you could backup multiple times, but your goig to do that anyway right?). The nice thing about the IBM/Tivoli units is when you run out of space, you can just get another silo, and more SAN. Your existing Tivoli server can still be used to back things up. Some say well, tapes have legs too....yeah, but it's MUCH harder for someone to swipe one if the door's locked and it's in a card accessed data center. I know the DVD jukes could be locked too, but it's much more tempting to try to steal something more commonly available. How easy is it to find a Magstar tape drive that a home user/hacker could afford?? DVD Juke's are not that great of a idea. I can't guarantee reliablity or data retrieval on a DVD. On a SAN I more readily can do this(and the SAN would be much faster to boot!). And if the data doesn't change, you can always have the users mount the drives in a read only status. Then they can't over write the files.
Gorkman
Ehh... about choice number 1 in your list; only if you're REAL lucky.
I originally had a Phillips DVD+RW drive, and quickly learned it wasn't compatible with anything but itself, and some of the DVD-ROM drives in computers out there. I returned it promptly.
Then, I read all the hype about the Pioneer A03 (and now A04) being the only sensible choice, since the write-once DVD-R media it burns is much more compatible with the average set-top DVD player.
I bought my A03, and while the drive seems to be great quality -- I haven't had any luck making a DVD movie that plays on anything other than a computer's DVD-ROM drive.
My Sony Playstation 2 makes a pretty valiant effort to play the DVD-R movies - but they seem to start getting read errors as you near the end of the disc. This is really frustrating when you're watching a 90 min. long or so movie, and right when it hits the action-packed climax - it stutters and quits playing with an "invalid media" message on the screen!
I also own a Samsung set-top DVD player (the model 812). It refuses to play anything on DVD-R discs I create. It seems to read the disc and recognize it as valid - but then it typically gets errors trying to bring up the initial menu screens. If you ignore that and press PLAY, it starts playing but skips large portions of the movie, freezes occasionally, and the sound stutters.
In my experience so far, the people tabulating lists of which DVD players are "compatible" are simply dropping DVD-R discs in the devices and seeing if it recognizes them as a movie. That's only the first part of the battle, folks. If it can't play the entire movie error-free, what's the use?
That's a valid point. As long as you leave the harddrive in place, that's true. But if you have it in a swap mount, things look different. The point is, a DVD is a plastic disc. A harddrive contains a lot of moving parts and sensitive electronics. The data on a DVD is burnt into a layer of dye. On a harddrive, the information is encoded as tiny magnetic fields, which decay over time.
[DVDs] Are also proprietary. Are you sure your DVD-R can read the DVD you burned on another company's DVD-R?
Almost every DVD drive or player you can buy right now can at least read DVD-Rs. Older ones probably too. I don't know about the other standards, but DVD-R seems to be the most agreed upon.
Data on a DVD-R can't be intentionally erased, or even modified. This isn't necessarily a good thing. Depends on how up-to-date you need your data to be, doesn't it?
Of course, depends on the type of data. To quote the original poster: "My company has a large file archive of documents and data that don't necessarily need to be stored on read/write media [...]"
Lastly, as to 20 year old harddrives being incompatible with today's, yes that is true. But you have no crystal ball, and you can't say that today's HDDs will be inaccessible in 20 years, nor can you be sure that CD and DVD will continue to be familiar formats.
There's very good reason to assume that. The DVD is not only a standard for computers, but also for consumer appliances, i.e. DVD players. As long as there are going to be DVD movies, there will be DVD-ROM drives. And probably even after that. Ever wondered why a DVD is the size of a CD? Because it allows the DVD drive to read CD-ROMs. I'd bet that 10 years from now you can still buy a drive that reads CD-ROMs. The same will be true for DVDs: drives will be backward compatible.
Besides, if the data is important enough to be kept around, chances are the hardware to access it will be too (or haven't you seen machine rooms that still use tape backups from X years ago?)
Well, tell that to the guys at the JPL: "For example, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is facing a crisis due to the huge libraries of data from space probes like Pioneer that are stored on aging seven-track tapes for which readers are no longer made."
(I believe there was a story about this on /., but I couldn't find it. The quote is from this article.
)
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
I have to say that I haven't ran into the compatibility problems with my Pioneer A04. To be honest, it has worked perfectly to play movies on *every* set top DVD player I have tried so far (but in fairness, I have tried less than 15 players total). Maybe the errors you are running into have something to do with the software being used (just a guess). I use a Mac with iMovie and iDVD.
-Bill
Also, it can burn CDs at 12X. DVDs only burn at 2.4X
Actually, 2.4x DVD is faster than 12x CD. 12x CD transfers at 12 times 150 KB, or 1800 KB/s, while 2.4x DVD transfers at 2.4 times 1152 KB/s (I think) to make 2700 KB/s.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As other replies have stated, DVD isn't a mature technology yet. If you're into bleeding edge technology, feel free to experiment.
Tape is still the cheapest media and most widely used and will continue to get more dense and less expensive over the next 4-5 years. You can currently buy LTO1 and AIT3 tapes for less than $100 per 100GB tape in large quantities. Sony has a 500GB half-inch format (S-AIT) coming out within a year. The jukeboxes and libraries are still expensive compared to CD changers, but if you have alot of data to backup, their up-front cost is not as significant. If you have lots of small data sets (600MB) to archive, it might make sense to use something random-access like CDs or near-line disk. If you have large databases or filesystems to archive, it's alot easier to manage one 100GB tape rather than 153 CDs or 20 DVDs for the same data. How are you going to manage and inventory all of those CDs? If you need to store more than 1TB, consider disk or tape solutions instead.
ATA disk-based technology might seem inexpensive at first. I've seen FCAL/SCSI solutions lower that $20/GB. I've seen commercial ATA RAID5 subsystems as low as $10/GB. One can build-it-yourself using off-the-shelf cheap parts ($3/GB white box system?), but would you trust your data on the cheapest disk technology? What happens when a disk dies or when the filesystem becomes corrupted? Consider, also, how you might scale a disk-based solution beyond 1TB (if that's what you need to do). Think about power, cooling, managing failed drives, etc. Also, do you really need to keep disk drives actively spinning for data you might not access again for at least 6 months?
In short, if you have less than 2TB of data to backup and small data sets, CD is inexpensive, but building an ATA-based archive system could work better, especially for managing the data. If you need to archive more than 10TB, tape is still the best proven way to go. In between, it may be possible to mix and match technologies to be cost-effective and still provide good performance. For example, you might keep 3-6 months of data on disk and archive the rest to a tape library.
-ez
Well, lucky you! You can buy one now! Over 2 months ago microsoft decided to back DVD+R/RW. ;)
As for DVD management software in "Longhorn", here's a quote for ya: "Microsoft will be adding support for DVD+RW into a future version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, according to the site."
Depending on the application, jukeboxes can cause unacceptable latency. If the data is accessed via a web page, you'll lose a lot of customers who won't wait 30+ seconds for the page to start loading. And if a lot of people are using the data (200 disks & 1 drive), the delays will make the system completely unusable.
I purchased an HP DVD+RW about 6 months ago and I no longer use it. A couple of reasons:
:-)
1. I've already lost three disks full of information because HP's software cannot seem to handle system crashes. Windows crash = Lose all of your data. (remember I'm using DVD+RW).
2. A big hard disk with a firewire or USB2.0 enclosure is cheaper, faster, and more portable.
3. The lack of a standard has resulted in sketchy compatibility with home DVD players so burning video is a real problem.
4. The lack of a standard also affects PC DVD drives. Sometimes disks work and sometimes they don't. I have experienced complete BSOD's on Win2K when putting a DVD+RW in a friend's player (never seen one before).
If you are still set on buying a DVD writer, then I suggest the following:
1. If you want to burn video, look at your existing DVD player (and those of anyone you want to share with) and check this chart to see which style of drive to get (DVD-R or DVD+RW) http://www.vcdhelp.com/dvdplayers.php
2. If you want to do data backups, remember this when using DVD+RW:
Only backup or restore data after a cold boot. Even then you may lose everything if something untoward happens during the process.
3. Really think hard about the external hard disk.
$130 120 gig hard drive
$ 60 Firewire external enclosure
or
$350 DVD Writer
$216 24 DVD-R disks (@ 120 gig)
You can always buy the DVD Writer next year with the $350 you saved getting the hard disk and probably end up with better technology, faster write times, a better shot at compatibility, and a cool 120 gig hard drive with external firewire enclosure.
When people come up with these rules of thumb, I have to be honest and wonder what they're doing that I'm not. I recall reading several people saying that DVDs cannot stand being played more than 8 or 9 times. Tell that to my Criterion "Brazil" DVD which has been played more often than that, and spent time in my laptop and other such horrors. And I'm not even that careful with my discs - I'll try to hold them by the edges and I'll keep them, most of the time, in the cases (occasionally I'll just leave them in the player for a few days while I don't use the player) but, frankly, that's it. I'm not anally retentive about it, certainly not as much as most people I know. Oh yeah, and for the last four years I've lived in Florida, and before that in Britain, so these CDs have undergone some horrendous temperature/humidity abuses.
Scarily, even most floppies I have from ten years ago or so seem to have kept most of their data - and while you might be tempted to go "Aha! Most! Not all!", I'd point out that floppies have always been crap at storing all of their data, time doesn't seem to be a factor with them. They're either crap or... (and remember that magnetic storage is hardly new, and most sound media that's more than 15 years old has been stored on magnetic tracks. That means that 30 year old movie you have on DVD with the awesome sound actually has audio that was on tape for 25-29 years before it was transfered to a digital format.)
So where do these "facts" about how fragile the things are come from? The only thing I can think of is that CDs and DVDs aren't always perfect to begin with, and this gives them a reputation which leads people to automatically assume that they're going to get worse with age. In reference to the aforementioned Brazil DVD, it's actually "improved" with age (most likely there was a speck of dirt somewhere that's fallen off) in that there was a part of the disc that used to stutter and now it no longer does.
Keep your DVDs and CDs in a case when you're not using them, don't hold them by the flat sides, and don't scrub the surface with the label and they should last. Probably much more than ten years too. Honest.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That should have been titled "some bad advice"... Why not learn a little about the subject before pontificating?
1) The -R/-RW media is cheaper for now, but the difference for usable media isn't that high (the cheap disks aren't worth buying).
2) The compatibility of +R and -R in DVD players is equal. If one works, the other probably will also.
3) No, it isn't. Apple is selling the A03, the current is the A04.
You left out that the -R format can't read the position of the heads, but +R can. +RW disks can be used for random access file systems (not the fastest, but it works). This is why MSFT is including support for the +R/RW format in "longhorn" (but don't hold that against the format). If you want to hold something against one format, try the official websites for both. The +R/RW site works with non-IE browsers, the -R/RW won't (the front page will load, but try actually browsing through the site...). HP, which nominally supports Linux, is in the +R/RW camp. The HP DVD200e is working well under Linux for me, even if dvdrecord doesn't have pretty front ends like cdrecord yet... (on the good side, there isn't a LaCie finger snapping bug either...)
One of the main reasons we chose the +RW drives over the -RW drives, is the fact that the data can be written to the drives on loaded, slow systems, or across a network. A disk image does not need to be created, the data is written directly to the device from a modified mkisofs. The -R/RW drives require the system to burn the DVD in real-time, typically from an ISO image stored on disk. Buffer under-runs are a disticnt possibility if the system isn't up to the task of feeding the higher data rate of DVD drives. Another big plus over -R/RW media was the +R/RW's ability to incrementally add data to the media. I've not tested this. Reports indicate that Linux works transparently with the resultant multi-session file system, but other OS's are not, and only see data in the first session.
We are satisfied users of the HP 200i DVD+RW drives and dvd+rw-format and growisofs utilities found at http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/
I have found that few of our older DVD-ROM drives can read either -RW or +R/RW media, although DVD-ROM drives purchased with our most recent Dell PC's can read both. Of course, YMMV.