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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?"
You'd have to have a fairly large jukebox system before it would begin to be cost-competitive with hard drive storage, wouldn't you? How much data are we talking about here?
Why mess with DVD-Anything for online storage?
I just picked up a few 120GB disks for $110/each. That will hold a lot of DVD's worth of Data. If the data needs to be kept on-line, HD's are much faster than any DVD drive. You'll also need another DVD drive for each 5-10GB of data, if using DVD's. So, the HD solution is much cheaper too.
DVD's are fine for backing up that data, but for real-time access, they are not ideal.
DVD burners will go the same way as CD burners. There may be a bit more competition over formats (since it's a lot more obvious how much of a cash cow DVD burning is going to be for corporations), but eventually they will become fairly inexpensive. Give it at least six more months, if not a year or so, before you consider making DVD burners part of your company's storage strategy.
As someone once said, that's the great thing about standards, there are so many of them. You might want to wait and let the dust settle rather than risk a heavy investment in a possible orphan format. Already HP and a couple of other makers are weasling on drives that were supposed to be software upgradeable to record more than one DVD-R or RW format, but it turns out it's not going to be that simple and the hardware will have to be replaced.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
DVD+RW is technically not even a DVD format. Technically, it can't even be called "DVD". It can't even use the familiar DVD logo. Only formats approved by DVD Forum (DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW) can technically use the name DVD and the DVD logo. DVD+RW is more appropriately referred to as "the +RW format". It's bad enough they're confusing the marketplace by having two formats with the same exact name with only a non-alphanumeric character being different between the two.
All that said, yes, all the big Wintel companies will probably successfully force DVD+RW on the marketplace, and eventually win out. You're sold yourself: referring to +RW as "3rd generation" (it's not) and "newer" (which it is, but you're using it to imply "better" or "more mature", which it's not). +RW is a COMPETITOR to DVD-RW, not a generation ahead of it. DVD-RW is the accepted DVD Forum standard, but apparently the Wintel crowd just couldn't stand Apple being first[1] to the table with a new technology again.
[1] As in, the first big player to mainstream it, akin to 802.11 with AirPort.
> why don't you guys just buy a few HDs?
Great idea. All they'd need then is some sort of terabyte backup system. Do you recommend CDs, DVDs or tape?
This keeps coming up again and again. No matter how cheap HDs get, they just don't have the durability, portability, or lifetime of "real" offline storage. Sadly, backup technology just isn't keeping up with HD capacities. When >1GB drives first came out, you could get 20GB tapes. Now that we've got 100GB drives, the world needs a TB archive media.
Drinking will help us plan!