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Combined DVD Burners Coming Soon
MonMotha writes "Sony recently announced plans to make a DVD burner capable of supporting both the - (DVD-R and DVD-RW) as well as the + (DVD+RW and DVD+R) standards for burnable DVD media. This move could spur the adoption of DVD burners, which have been poor sellers so far, partly due to the lack of a single standard for writable and rewritable media. The drive will not support the older DVD-RAM due to it's plastic casing."
We don't need this! Why would anyone ever need to carry more than 1.44mb around with them? ;)
It sounds awfully confusing for a normal consumer if they buy one of these super combined dvd burners...
can you imagine? This guy wants to burn a dvd, but when he hits burn, he has 4-5 choices to pick between( DVD-R, DVD+R, etc...). While this is good for more technical people, I can't see this being a feature normal consumers would buy this for.
I personally think there needs to be one standard.
its the cost thats the problem not the standard , a genaric dvd burner runs around 264$(pricewatch)(400$ at my local comp usa) a lot more then most people are willing to spend when they rarely use more then a normal cdr. Its cheaper to buy a hard drive
You know, this really *isn't* good for DVD recording ....
....
:)
I can't wait for the day we standardize. Don't really care which wins the "war", but it needs to be one or the other.
Nobody is going to look at the label on a 50-pack in the store to see if it's a DVD-R or DVD+R. DVD recording won't take off till Bill the Accountant can walk into CompUSA and ask for a pack of DVD discs to put his stuff on without having to worry about brands and standards and all that jazz....
We just need to pick one and let the other one die off
Of course, I'd +prefer+ it to be DVD-R, just 'cuz my Apple SuperDrive^W^WPioneer DVR-A03 is a DVD-R.
Drives are min $300 for a -R/-Ram.
But many people have CD-Rs.
DVD-R and CD-R media both cost $.2 per gig now.
The startup cost is so much it seems better
to buy a few IDE drives and wait till the price
comes down. The only good thing is the (linear)
rewriteable -RW which are as cheap as -R which is
great.
And why not include -RAM? Its media is cheaper
than +RW (the most similar), and it is so established.
I used to work retail, and I can tell you the number one reason why these things aren't being readily adopted: piracy, or rather lack thereof.
/.ers just said, "yeah" and Joe User spaced out when I mentioned DeCSS. On top of that, creating a DVD of home videos is difficult for Joe unless he's running an Apple, but he heard those suck 'cause they can't run windows. (Note to Apple fans: I said for Joe User, not for real people. I own two apples, and I love 'em).
I'm serious. I've owned three different CD Burners going back to the days when they started to become remotely affordable (as DVD burners are now). When I first got them, truth be told, it was for the purpose of creating mix CDs (completely legal) and burning MP3s found from the various FTP sites (this was around the time when Napster was just barely registering on geek radar, much less the public's eye). My current unit hasn't ever written a single CD with music on it (at least not for the purpose of playing in a CD player... I've probably archived an mp3 at some point). I use it heavily for backing up data, particularly TV shows that I time shift and digital photos.
But this isn't what the average Joe user uses it for. I know, I talk to them every day. They want it for music, almost exclusively for music. In fact, a lot of Joe Users aren't aware that CD burners can be used for anything else (seriously).
From Joe User's perspective, copying a CD is easy. Converting and burning an MP3 is easy. It's all done with fun, easy wizards. Drag and drop songs until the wizard says the CD is "full". Press start.
doing the same with DVDs isn't easy. First, I have to contend with running DeCSS and ripping the video off of the DVD. Assuming the source is a single layer, single side DVD, all I have to do is write and go. Assuming it isn't, now I have to split the source file into two different DVDs or recompress into a tighter space. See, all the
DVD Burners do have many great uses, just as CD Burners do, even to Joe. But for him, the gateway use is copying movies, just as his gateway use on the CD burner was copying CDs. Would he discover cool uses for his DVD burner just as he did his CD Burner? Sure. But right now it's too difficult for him to use it for what he perceives to be it's primary purpose.
The Pioneer drive that Apple puts in their PowerMac and new iMacs (dubbed "SuperDrive") is really nice, but it doesn't do +RW. Dell is putting someone elses DVD writer in their computers that does +RW but they don't even offer a -RW alternative.
And besides, Sony is the best darn electronics company on the planet (:
Maybe now I can upgrade my Sony 12x to a DVD writer. What are the speeds up to these days?
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Now just please tell me when HP is going to own up to their promise to provide owners of the DVD 100i the capability to burn DVD-r's (one way or another). At this point, I'm leaning towards avoiding any first generation product offered from anyone, and specifically avoiding any and all HP purchases in the future. If you're going to promise something, make sure it's possible first; and don't edit the FAQ later without so much as telling anyone to make it look like you never promised what you did, in fact, promise. Remember, the people who buy the first-gen products are the ones who help shape what hits mainstream.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
All the existing consumer DVD-R and DVD+R drives I'm aware of can burn CDs too, so I think there's no reason to believe this one will be any different.
I just think it's about hilarious that the word "standards" is actually used.
If there is more than one, how can it even be standard? Sure, I realize that they individally have their own protocol , but having more than one nullifies the word standard right? Or no?
Get your Unix fortune now!
I can't wait to see the labels for this one:
"the new Sony DVD(\+|\-)R(|W) Foo2002! Now super-easy for you and your family!"
Even funnier, this won't help much with limiting the playback confusion - some of these formats are data-centric, others video player-centric... and do _any_ of these encompass the Audio standard?
According to news out this week, Sony has been quietly building CD-RW burners with anti-copying technology built in. Sony is also leading the push on drm legislation which will take away your fair use rights to backup that CD/DVD for protection from scratches, aging, and many other purposes, which are legal under fair use law.
It's up to you to decide whether you will support a company that is trying as hard as possible to prevent you from transfering music from your CD to your Rio or your car, or for backup purposes, etc.
It's up to you to decide whether Sony is acting in your best interest, or their own selfish interests by setting up a tollbooth on the digital highway that is becoming harder and harder to avoid.
How many of you knew that Sony was building anti-copying technology into their CD-RW burners that they are currently selling? I certainly didn't know, but since I refuse to purchase any Sony products due to their stance on "digital rights management", I am somewhat protected. By avoiding the companies that are pushing hard on drm, I am mitigating some of the damage they are doing to my ability to backup my property.
btw, have you unchecked the drm box in wmp before burning that CD? If not, you burned drm anti-copying abilities into your CDs.
See NYFairUse for more info.
I disagree that the lack of a single unified standard has had a significant depressive influence on the sale of recordable DVD drives. I think that it's rather a lack of demand.
In other words, how many people actually have a driven requirement to burn DVDs? While most of us geeks would think that it's an immensely desirable thing, in actuality, the average PC user doesn't have a need for DVD-R technology.
While the media has been making it sound like all the rage, home-producing video DVDs is actually not yet widespread. It's great use of quality technology, but the average Joe doesn't do it...yet.
Storage space is extremely cheap -- $100 for 120 GB IDE drives. To the average user, that's an immense, almost dauntingly large amount of space which they'll probably never use. Why spend extra on a DVD recordable drive, and several bucks each on DVD media when you don't need that much space (4.7 GB per disc, usually) in a transportable form?
The fact is, most people don't need DVD-recordable drives. If they did, they'd purchase one regardless of the lack of a single unified standard, as long as the product does what it needs to. That's a fairly typical consumer mindset with computer technology recently -- "who cares about the standards, because they'll all be different in another month!"
On the Apple side, it's profitable for them to offer DVD-R technology as a standard, because their users are typically more multimedia-centric, and have suitable user-friendly tools for the most basic to the most advanced users to utilize the technology to its fullest. For most PC-users, it's merely purchasing a machine with superfluous technology.
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
Will they call it... a CD±RW drive?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I keep looking at these drives, but from what I've read if you put a SVCD on to a DVD-RW a normal player won't read it. They expect DVD Video on a DVD-RW disc, not SVCD.
Anyone know some good software to convert SVCD to DVD Vid?
I was discussing this very subject today. It's pertty much agreed that the biggest problem is the cost of the drive itself, followed by the cost of media.
My guess it that the price point for wide purchase of DVD Writers is $179...why $179? Well, this suggests that the $199 point would have already been reached...but most think "That's just $200"...no one want's to pay $200 for a drive....And $189 would have also been broken...but some won't buy there...and when you get to $179, you already have 3 choices under $200 and this suggest a good selection. And at the $179 price point, this suggests that there is likely to be a $169 drive in the near future...and you're no longer talking ~$200, but ~$150.
For some, media cost is a problem, but it's likely to go down as soon as ppl start buying burners.
The real problem is, lack of cheap drive manufacturers...you know, the Lite-Ons and the Pacific Digitals (Mostly repackaged Mitsumis).
Got lucky in Wal-Mart and picked up 2 Philips DVD+RW burners for $78.84 apiece when they were selling for ~$480 each. Talk about rolling back the prices. They must have screwed up and thought they were selling CD-RW drives 'cause I haven't seen them since.
Its suprising to see that some people fail to see the larger picture which DVD-R brings. Walk into any Blockbuster/VideoEzy/Video library, rent a movie overnight, stick it into your PC and start ripping and recompressing, and burn the movie onto your DVD-R. Total cost for movie ownership - $5 for rental and $5 for blank DVD-R. This will get cheaper, since blank media prices will fall. Most video libraries also offer a rent 5 movies for $10 deal, so you can get 5 movies for $35, or $7 each at current prices. Of course, you have to factor in burner and PC ammortisation and electricity, but you get the general idea. When blank disks cost $2 each, you're looking at $4 for pirated movie disks. Great value in any book, when you take into consideration that most movies cost $20 or so. You miss out on the menus and extra features, but you can always burn them onto another disk. The best thing is that you dont get to see the FBI style warnings before every disk (telling you how wrong it is to do what you've just done).
The best part about this situation is that free software already exists which can rip a DVD and compress it to fit on a 4.38Gb (4.7G) disk at the push of a button. Just hit start, flip disks 2 hours later, and hit burn. If you have a second DVD-ROM, you dont even have to hit burn - insert the two disks (original and blank), and just hit Start.
Of course, the MPAA will catch onto this soon, but its too late to introduce new counter measures. The cat is out of the bag.
Revolution = Evolution
Just as soon as these burners hit the markets, I expect Sony to introduce SVDVD (Super Video Digital Video Disk), with a higher bandwidth and a richer, emotionally more intense "look" that is often compared to film.
The SVDVD signal will, of course, be recorded on a special third layer that cannot be seen, let alone read, by any device sold as a computer peripheral.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
When I bought my PowerMac, Apple was having trouble keeping the Combo drive (CD-RW/DVD) in stock, and since both of those were requirements of mine, I ended up going with the Superdrive.
This summer, I was put into a position where I had to distribute about 3.2 gigs worth of material to numerous people by mail.
Borken up into somewhat logical chunks, the material took seven CD-Rs.
The solution, obviously, was to burn DVD-Rs. I was amazed at how easy it was and how effectively it worked. At 2x, I burned the material in a little over 20 minutes per disc.
In the end, I am glad I ended up paying the extra for the Superdrive. The ability to assure that most everyone would be able to read the discs in their DVD drive equipped PC was very nice.
My big comment: I see no reason for RW for most material. CD-Rs have gotten so cheap that I do not mind burning 30 megs worth of pictures to take to the local print shop for printing. I just throw the disc away after that.
I do not see a strong reason to deal with slower burn speeds and more expensive media just to be able to reuse what I now consider to be disposible media.
That might just be me.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Four years ago, a few people would buy CD-Rs for pirating audio cds and computer/playstation games. Since they were still quite expensive, they'd charge people they knew $5 to copy discs, thus helping to recoup some of their costs. Sort of like a community-owned CD-R drive, only one person actually controls it.
Nobody does that with DVD-R drives currently, because it's not really possible to copy a DVD to a DVD-R and have it play in standard DVD players. So very few people want them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Even when CD-R's weren't that easy to use, they at least weren't too difficult either, and worked. You could take an audio CD, copy it to another audio CD, and have it play in any standard CD player.
You can't do that with DVDs. You can't take a DVD, copy it to another DVD, and have it play in the vast majority of DVD players. It'll only work if you burn your own videos to DVD, or if you have a hacked player of some sort.
So in a way, the copy-protection thing is working. Sure, you can defeat it, but most people don't bother. They want a DVD that plays on their player, and it's hard to get a pirated one that does, so they just buy a legitimate copy.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's impossible to do an exact bit-for-bit copy of a DVD to a DVD-R, because the blank DVD-R media has some bits in the header burned out. So most such copies won't play on most DVD players, at least without some modification (either a firmware hack, a modchip, or discovery of an easter-egg in the firmware).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In comparison I have seen CD-RW drives for $80 and media for under $1 a disk. The price differential is simply not justified by a mere ten-fold increase in capacity. It is pretty obvious that the price of the drives will be slashed to reasonable levels before they catch on on a scale large enough to make the media affordable.
The big problem is that there is absolutely no backup media on the market that is as cost effective as an IDE hard disk drive! An IDE drive with a capacity of 120Gb can be bought for just over $1 per GB and requires only a $20 caddy to make it into a removable medium. If they would make them hot swappable there would be no reason to use anything else. They are faster than and have a higher capacity than tape drive systems costing tens of thousands. Best of all even if a drive fails entirely you have a chance at recovery - try that with a mag tape that has been chewed in a faulty drive.
I tried to explain this idea to the Iomega investors some time ago when they were convinced that everyone would be queuing up to buy Jaz and the clik! disk would be taking over the world. DVD-RW still suffers from the same sort of economics as the Jaz drive - media too expensive to use as a backup, drive system too expensive.
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The space for CSS key blocks is nonwritable on standard DVD media.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
When they finally (if ever) decide on a standard for the DVD recordable formats, will they be compatible with current (and future) DVD drives? I'd buy a DVD[+/-]R drive or whatever they call the new standard for backup purposes, as long as it was compatible with other dvd (player) drives I have and may buy in the future. If not, well, then I probably won't buy one.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Sony have been in the poo with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) a number of times now.
They add 'regioning' to their Playstation 2 games, so you can't play games from different regions on the 1 playstation. They are a member of the DVD cartel who are forcing the same regioning on DVD consumers.
They are trying to sue people for buying AND selling Playstation MOD chips.
They are the most expensive brand, but lack the quality to justify the premium.
Go with a more consumer-friendly company. They aren't hard to find...
One thing I hate about new standards and most technologies, is that they tend to keep the "final" on a shelf until they can squeeze every single stepping out from pratically useless to the final product.
:) )
CDroms, 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 6x, 8x, 12x, 16x, 20x, 24x, 32x, 40x, 48x, 56x, (and the blowing one from a previous slashdot story?
CD-R, same pattern.
Guess what, yes when they did the 1x they probably didn't have a 48x machine working off the bat, but in all of the steppings you've seen above, probably only 3 stepping were required and the rest were physically locked with a firmware, etc..
Where I am going with this? Well, simple. In some cases, it's acceptable and even good to hold off technology for a buisness model to work and for a company to have enough time to do R&D and accumulate enough revenues to sustain the operating costs, that's the goal of this maneuver.
But this is where I get upset:
DVD-RW (or +RW or anything for that matter) we were promised double layer double density double sided. The only thing we got is double-crossed. Right now we're sitting on a 4.7GB medium that was supposed to be 4x that amount (or at least 2x with the double layer and you'd have to turn the disc). DVD's been around for quite a while, yet, I'm not remotely impressed by this technology anymore. I've recently picked up a 99$ dvd player (about time they came down to that price) and why did Y buy it? because it was playing CD-R, CD-RW, VCD/SVCD, MP3 and mpeg-1 video burned on joliette CD. That was the interresting part about it.
I would have been an INSTANT adopter at an overpriced range if they would have brought the technology they had promised. When the VHS VCD came out, and tapes were costing a bundle, I bought them, I loved the technology, I loved what it could bring me, and I didn't get lied to or hyped with what it would be and got 1/2 of it.
DVD, when it got out, should have been 9.4GB-ready from the start, more expensive units should have had 2-sided reader/writer and cheaper units needing to turn the disk or buy a 1sided disc. They could have segmented the market like this for the home and pro. They could have kept the readers-only for cheap for mass-adoption and everything would have worked out just fine and probably taken off more seriously. They've had to retain, and now you get technology like TIVO that records a lot more, manages better than handling 30 dvds, and just plain rocks.
Of course when they'll hit 99$ they will become interresting, but probably Hollywood will unleash that incompatible 2layer-blue-2sided-blabla laserdisc format...
Anyways my rant isn't about this stuff comming out, it's about WHEN it comes out (blattantly retarded) and how it comes out, the cutdown features, and the fact that it's almost obsolete with other technologies on the edge. Too bad they aren't getting as much competition as the microprocessor sector is getting, because today you'd have HDVD that would support full HDTV signal with full quality and not only READ about it or have one prototype if you got 5 digits to spare. oh well...
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Actually, despite what the article says, the latest DVD-RAM disks don't require casing.
Furthermore, DVD-RAM has a projected lifespan of 100,000 read-write cycles, compared to about 1000 for DVD+R/-R. So it's really an attractive format and it'll be a shame if Sony doesn't include it in their combo drive.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
DVD-RAM makes for excellent jukebox archivers though.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
There's many reason to use tape over ide hard drives, not the least of which being _less points of failure_. With a tape drive you have 1 motor, 1 read/write head, and none of these ever move more than a fraction of an inch, they never get dropped, they never get shaken up. If a tape gets left in someones car and melts, so what, you lost 1 tape, a few bucks and ones days backup, maybe not a huge lost since you've got a weeks worth of tapes.
Now a hard drive on the other hand, Bill says to Sally from accounting, "take this to Ted in IT while you're headed over there"
Sally drops the drive "Oops, I better not tell Bill or Ted"
Of course, Ted get the drive and its dead. Tape on the other hand, if Sally dropped it, would be fine, even if the case cracked, so what, open another tape, switch the reels, no biggie. Hard drive platters don't take switching quite as well, and data recovery, in a clean room, ain't cheap.
This also is the reason that backing up to optical media makes sense a lot of times, most of my real serious backups have at least one copy on optical (meaning CD) media.
So far, though, I've been pretty satisfied with my Pioneer DVR-A03. It supports DVD-R/RW and CD-R/RW. I can't really say that I've missed DVD+R/RW capability.
However, having more vendors shipping DVD-R/RW drives will obviously help drive down the price.
What I really want (aside from the aformentioned sharks) is a laptop DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW drive that will fit in my Fujtisu Lifebook P-2040 subnotebook. It came with a Toshiba SD-R2102 combo drive that can read DVD and DVD-R media (I haven't tried other DVD formats), and write CD-R/RW. But being able to burn DVD-R on the go would be a nice improvement.
Even though laptop DVD-R/RW drives have been announced, I'll probably have to wait until Fujitsu offers one for a Lifebook, because they use a custom bezel. Unless maybe I can use the bezel from the SD-R2102. Time will tell.
DVD[+-]RW?
DVD burners are slow on uptake because there are different standards, you say?
Gee. Here was I, thinking the reason I didn't buy a DVD burner was primarily the cost of the media, compared to CD-R. As long as I don't need to master a DVD, but just need data backup, CD-Rs come at 35 cents a gig, whereas DVD-Rs are around a dollar a gig still.
So my question to myself is "Would I pay three times the money for a disc burner, and three times the price for the media, to get them on DVD format instead of CD?". My answer to that question is "no".
I don't care too much about the competing standards - both DVD-R and DVD+R can be read in a regular DVD reader, and as long as that's the case, the media format would be a non-issue when selecting a DVD burner, as far as compatibility goes.
I cannot imagine I am the only human on Earth to reason this way.
I could do the same thing for years with VHS but I never did. Thing is pretty much when I rent a movie, I see it once and then I'm done, I don't care to have a copy. Too much effort and an unnecessary fee for the blank to make a copy. If I wanted to won it, I'd buy it and get a higher quality copy. Well DVD-Rs aren't big enough to hold most commerical movies. You'd have to srtip out all the extras and audio tracks to make most fit and teh big ones you'd have to reocde to a lower bitrate. No thnaks, I want all that stuff, I'll buy the DVD for teh few I want to own, and just rent the rest.
In comparison I have seen CD-RW drives for $80 and media for under $1 a disk...The big problem is that there is absolutely not backup media on the market that is as cost effective as an IDE hard disk drive...An IDE drive...can be bought for just over $1 per GB and requires only a $20 caddy to make it into a removable medium.
Something about the math is not working out for me here.
May we never see th
At least in Sweden -R discs are about half price of a +R disc. Seems like rather good reason if you ask me.
You don't get it. A 120GB HDD costs like $300 right? now you want to back it up.
CDs are out of the question (can you say 170 CDs!!)
A DVD-R drive (right now) costs the same or more than the drive, then you have to buy the media, and you don't want to buy the cheapest right, because it's a backup. And it still takes like 24+ disks to do a backup.
So the only viable option for backup is DDS tape. Which you need like $4000 just to get going. So the backup costs over 10x the media?!?! Most places simply CANNOT affort this, it's not an issue of will not. You can buy like 4 whole systems for that.
So what do you do. Well you just buy another drive for $300, put it in another machine, and work up a system whereby it's mostly isolated from the system it's backing up. (off-site being ideal.) You could even buy 2 or 3 and not even come close to the price of the DDS solution.
At some point DDS becomes economical, say if you have 15 120GB drives to back up, but if you only have one sometimes you just can't justify it. Also there is some breakpoint in how much that data is worth. If it's worth enough, yes you should probably have it on tapes in a saftey deposit box or something.
For my purposes shutting down the machine to mount and dismount backup media is perfectly OK. And yes I would use the same strategy in a production environment, only I would use a couple of high end EMC storage cluster devices. Thing is that tape backup is even worse value when you go to the real high end stuff. I have used multi-million dollar tape robot systems and they tend to suck.
I believe the drive caddy makes it so you can plug the "backup drive" in and out without rebooting the server
Well you can get a caddy that does that but why the drive manufacturers can't get a clue and just fix it is beyond me.
What I want is a 120Gb removable drive in my PVR. Then I will store all my movies on it.
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Sigh,
Lets go over the many things wrong with your "arguement".
The original discussion was using IDE hard drives as opposed to DVD. So we should be discussing this in relevant sizes (around 4.7gigs)
5gig tapes fly for around $5
new 5gig hard drives aren't available anymore so you're likely to buy at least a 40gig, smaller ones are too hard to find. So I can understand why you choose that.
But, what if your project is only 5gigs? So you've got 8days worth of backup on your single drive. I've got 8 days on 8 tapes. Which is more reliable from your standpoint.
I'm also amazed at the amount of time you spent on CDW, seeing as how you choose the cheapest IDE hard drive and the most expensive 50gb tape.By the way why did you choose 50gb when 40gb tapes are more common and cost so much less?
So let me correct your error by supplying you with the least expensive 40gig tape:
Verbatim 40GB 4MM Data Cartridge, single: $18.21
I hope they don't have to correct these sort of errors at your place of employment too often
You seem like a cost sensitive guy, so you're probably not paying for offsite storage of your backups, maybe you bring them home with you, I know plenty of people that do. Bill does it.
Have you seen Bill's driving, the guy is a nutcase. I don't even want to imagine how many times those tapes have flown around his backseat or trunk. I'm not about to trust IDE hard drive backups to Bill's driving.
And have you met Sally in accounting? Have you seen how Sally treats her floppy disks? She doesn't treat my tapes much better. Yeah, I've dropped hard drives too, but not as much as I've seen tapes abused.
Tapes are easier to store as well. I also like how you didn't touch the fact that data recovery on a broken tape is worlds easier and less expensive than that of a hard drive. I don't know about you, but if the guy doing data recovery on my hard drive isn't grounded in some way, I'm pretty annoyed.
Btw, DVD-R/RW writters got for $300 and sometimes less. Media is $5 a disk.
But hey, you use whatever you want for backup.
But who would do that (one week on a single HD) and consider it a backup? Of course, MORE MEDIA is more reliable than less media, which is why you mentioned having mirrored backups on Optical in your last post. *Unless that's not SUPPOSED to be a question ;)
I'm also amazed at the amount of time you spent on CDW, seeing as how you choose the cheapest IDE hard drive and the most expensive 50gb tape.By the way why did you choose 50gb when 40gb tapes are more common and cost so much less?
So let me correct your error by supplying you with the least expensive 40gig tape:
Verbatim 40GB 4MM Data Cartridge, single: $18.21
Err. There's no such thing as a 40GB 4mm tape. That's COMPRESSED. 4mm only goes to 20GB, which is why I COMPLETELY ignored that section, and picked the cheapest AIC tape, (Since you can just select 'lowest price first') which DOES have >20GB capacity, and compares nicely with the cheapest 40GB hd. My current position requires me to backup 20GB. I don't assume that I'm going to get ANYTHING other than what the media is rated for. Why should I get caught in the morning, with the drive beeping for a second tape? So going to AIC/DAT tapes is just logical (unless you want to get into multiple tape drives, what are those again, $500 each? Or 6 HD's?)
Tapes are easier to store as well. I also like how you didn't touch the fact that data recovery on a broken tape is worlds easier and less expensive than that of a hard drive.
I just find that odd. If a single days worth of data is THAT valuable that it can't be recreated, it's not just on the RAID and on tape, it's in another location. Then you don't HAVE to worry about data recovery...
I don't know about you, but if the guy doing data recovery on my hard drive isn't grounded in some way, I'm pretty annoyed.
We won't get into the security/liability issues of Bill and Sally wrecklessly handling your company data (I mean, if you KNOW Bill is a drunk, why'd you let him drive the truck for the glass company?)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Don't forget Firewire. You can get a Firewire external enclosure for $120. This will make your hard drive hot-pluggable.