Cost of DVD as data storage versus HDD (UK)

"David X" wrote in message
anews.com...
What is the cost of DVD storage in the UK? I am in the UK so my figures
reflect UK prices. I want to store data not music.

I would welcome any comments on my posting.


(1) I can buy a 160GB hard drive for approx £65 including delivery.
(E.G.
Maxtor Plus9 160GB 8MB 7200rpm from Dabs).
The available formatted space on the HDD is about 150GB (in 4K block with
NTFS), so this comes to 41p per GB.

Sustained data transfer rates are fast (about 15 MB/s according to
http://storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/str and
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/extSpeed-c.html) so the process of
getting data to or from the HDD is relatively quick.


(2) For CDs (not DVD) I would say the usable storage space is approx
500MB
(not 750 or 800 because it is rare to completely fill a CD and I believe
there is approx 10 percent used for error correction). I don't know what
block size is used.

I want to have a protective case and not use the very cheapest product.
100
cased CD-Rs is approx £22 including delivery. I need 300 to match 150GB
so
the total cost is £66. This excludes costs for the CD-R burner.

Data transfer rates when reading are not bad at about 3 MB/s (according to
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/cd/perfTransfer-c.html).


(3) DVDs. Now this is new to me. Are the following reasonable
assumptions.

Cased DVD+R or DVD-R 8x blanks are about £0.50 each (?).

Possibly but have a little patience and get a slightly slower speed. I got
4xdvd-r disks 100 for £19 works out 19p per disk or about 5p per gig.

while it is 4.7Gig dvd-r You can fit about 4.4gigs of data on one and I can
burn the whole thing in about 15 minutes.

Printable surface with no logos to you can lable them how ever you want or
simply write on them for easy archiving.

I would easily choose dvd writing over hard drive storage.

£19 gets you 100 disks on a spindle, plus I got a 240 space cd/dvd holder
for about £3 which keeps them scratch free and easy to store in a space
about 30cm long and about 10 cm wide...