Attached Link: whoa!

$600 for the drive, and $30 for 50GB dvd to burn in it, but aside from deciding your life for the next 10 years (paying it off lol) can't argue with the results :) i figure another 5 or so years? until this is more along the lines of what people can afford in their comps =P 

so.....and end to coasters? or a sudden boom in size of our current piles?:)

  Yeah, coasters.... me, I'm making mini anchor-balls. Meantime, I've found Pricewatch a good place to look for things. Lou.

(ADDED)... maybe I should just model them?... it'd likely be cheaper... Hmmm.

is the company selling the 50GB dvds the same company that brought us the burning laptop batteries and the celine dion CD that installed a rootkit? if so, I ain't buying 'em :lol:

This is about the same way that CD and DVD burners started - very, very expensive drives with very, very expensive media.  The first consumer CD burners were in the same price range and media cost $25+ PER DISC!  Now you can get a CD burner for $50 and 1000 CDs for $10!
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci508949,00.html

See the last paragraph and be sitting down... ;)

And they still made coasters.  Now they'll just be blu-ray coasters...

no...just more expensive coasters..;)

I've stopped using DVD-R/CD-R's long ago... it's actually cheaper per GB to just get an external USB enclosure and a big fat hard drive.

(it also helps to have an old Linux box nearby jammed solid  with disks configured in RAID 5  and running Bacula... ) I figure between the two additional copies, I'm set ...at least until I can grab hold of an LTO-3 tape drive (800GB compressed per tape) and a couple of blank tapes.

(then again, even an old DLT IV drive would work at this point (80GB compressed per tape), and would actually be cheap enough media-wise to be practical).

/P

My problem with tape drives (other than being slower because of the seek times) is that they are magnetic media.  Harddrives are as well, but they are somewhat insulated whereas tapes and floppy disks are prone to any magnetic fields in close proximity.  As a guitar player with a 250W amp and a Logitech Z-5500 500W in a small office, I have to be particularly careful about magnetic media.  There are speakers everywhere with nice big magnets!

External harddrives are nice, but they do occupy space.  Unless you are able to afford upgrading to larger and larger ones over time as data becomes larger and accumulates faster (I know this all too well), you'll end up with more and more of them.  Compared to CD/DVD discs that are virtually spaceless, external harddrives are big and take up space.  If you can trust ALL of your data on one big honkin' drive, so be it.

In a fire, for instance, I can grab my 320 disc bag and save all of my software and data archives (it's heavy, but easily transported by hand).  How much work is it to grab five or six external drives in such circumstances - and how much manhandling can they take similarly?

I understand ab't the magnetics... the rest? Well:

I did some poking around last night and found DLT tape drives for roughly ~$200 USD (not counting the cost of a SCSI card), and the media were reasonably priced as well.

While I understand that it's not for everyone (esp. when working with a network-based backup/recovery app), as someone who has done (and still does) Backup/Disaster Recovery professionally, I can say this in defense of tapes:

• Tapes have, on average, longer data retention times. With discs, it's a crap shoot for data integrity on a given CD/DVD-R after 24 months, as far too many reports out there can attest to. This is because of the dye used to simulate data tracks on the media.

• 320 std. DVD-R's = 1.44 Terabytes. You could also fit that onto 36 DLT (IV) 20/40 tapes. 320CD-R's = 224GB, or roughly 6 DLT 20/40 tapes. Bet I can run faster with 6 tapes than you can with 320 burned CD's :)

*Now, if we're talking ab't the new 50GB DVD-R's, we're talking moolah. I could buy a tape drive, tapes of the same or greater capacity, and a SCSI card... and the tapes are reusable. :)

Now, all that said, I wouldn't recommend it to the average user, at least not until there was something in place that was low/no cost, and didn't involve a bit of study (MSFT Backup might work...). I could do all of this w/ Bacula (a free network backup solution) and a cheap tape drive. Not everyone can do that...

/P

Quote - As a guitar player with a 250W amp and a Logitech Z-5500 500W in a small office, I have to be particularly careful about magnetic media.

And your hearing, I should think... :laugh:

EnglishBob: Heh,  speak up there sonny. ;)

Actually, my hearing is pretty good.  Probably because I play a mix of classical and electric and only play the latter loud on ocassion.  But I do like my music loud.

Penguinisto: I agree that tapes have a longer (or more determinate) data retention.  But I have never liked them.  Probably great for a business where you have to back up 100's of GB or several TB a week or month, but for home use, I'd rather have quick access, less chance of corruption, and simple transport.  And remember that my CD/DVD case has everything - can't install all of your software from a tape backup.  There should only be one thing to grab in a fire - not a turkey shoot for disparate stuff scattered about.  Computer hardware can be replaced easily - software and data is priceless (or about $30K plus gone-forever). ;)

I don't mind external drives, but keep two (mirrors) and keep two.  Any more and it starts to be a warehouse (I have four already and would rather have two - one is for quick transfers of data between systems).  We're getting close to 1TB drives, but you'll pay good money for it now - just like Blu-Ray tech.  The data sizes are definitely outstripping the storage capacities.  Software now comes on DVD.  I just installed a 320GB drive for my data and it's already half filled - that's with stuff off-loaded to DVD and external drives as well as three other drives in the system!

i despise tapes, and consider my 1 book (400 cd/dvd space) easy enough to carry lol

prefer the random access ability of cd/dvd :) and yes i've noticed software is coming towards dvd now, just bought a couple games with multi dvd o.0 makes me wonder if some game studios are getting sloppy on programming since the hardware is growing lol

plus i don't like having too much info in 1 place, i think current dvd will be my limit, and if blu-ray gets cheaper, i'd burn 2 copies of the same, for same reason i don't just use 500GB harddrives. if 1 gets a problem, for whatever reason, and no extra copy (which currently i have a backup to a external drive, and a copy on dvd) then bye bye when drive crashes =P

i'm still waiting for isolinear data rods from startrek......have usb data sticks, so getting closer

Quote - And remember that my CD/DVD case has everything - can't install all of your software from a tape backup.

Actually, I can restore an entire blank computer (OS, apps, data, the whole wad) in one go from a tape image and some sort of boot media. I've done so twice on servers in the past year or so.

As far as in an emergency? I'd keep 'em in a carrying case, ready to grab and go (though w/ a safe deposit box I wouldn't even have to worry too much about that).

I've been giving it some serious thought... I may just set one up come next payday (I already have a SCSI card that'll work...)

/P