Cost of DVD as data storage versus HDD (UK)

Hello Dorothy,

DB For the most part, DVD-RAM offers a good half-way house:

I'm keeping my eyes open for a nice SCSI DVD-RAM drive. Perhaps they
are mostly IEEE-1394 these days though.

DB ...even XCOPY can be forced to do a verification as I recall...

If I remember rightly, XCOPY's "verify" option verifies that what it
wrote is readable, not necesarily that it's what was in the source
file.

DB If HDs are used, I prefer a "micro-PC" converted to NAS...
...Mini-ITX snails don't cost much...

If only VIA would make an Eden board with Ultra160 or Ultra320 built
in! :-)

- Andy Ball

Andy Ball wrote:

DB ...even XCOPY can be forced to do a verification as I recall...

If I remember rightly, XCOPY's "verify" option verifies that what it
wrote is readable, not necesarily that it's what was in the source
file.

Go and get XXCOPY from www.xxcopy.com - it's freeware and does a
complete copy & verify.



--
Mushroom

Mushroom wrote:

Go and get XXCOPY from www.xxcopy.com - it's freeware and does a
complete copy & verify.

But I think that this still has the problem, when used for barking up,
of not deleting from the backup files that have been deleted from the
source.

On 21/10/2004 Michael Salem wrote:

Mushroom wrote:

Go and get XXCOPY from www.xxcopy.com - it's freeware and does a
complete copy & verify.

But I think that this still has the problem, when used for barking
up, of not deleting from the backup files that have been deleted from
the source.

I think you're backing up the wrong tree here :-)

--
Jeff Gaines - Damerham Hampshire UK
Posted with XanaNews 1.16.4.6
http://www.wilsonc.demon.co.uk/d7xananews.htm

I think you are correct HDD's are cheaper, also you excluded the cost of
of a CD burner so you can add another £20 or more, much more
to the CD option.

Then you have to consider the huge ammount of grief you will get from
CD's (burning problems, scratched disks, disks which won't work,
CD writers which wont work .....well read this group and you will
get the general idea).

Then there is the time cnsumed bburning your CDs, how would you
cost that? Several hundred pounds?

Then there is huge problem of storing, locateing, indexing of the
CDs.......

Oh I see I am talking about CD's not DVD's but the argurements are the
same except DVD burners are very expensive.

All you get from burnable media is grief and coasters.

You 300DVDs are 3 meters high and hardly portable!!

I think burning media is a dying art, in 3 years time
a 200GB drive will be what? £20?



"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 (?).

What does the nominal 4.7Gb actually hold when data is stored?

Is the block size relatively large?

What is the cost per GB assuming the disk is only 80% filled?


Overall, I get the impression that HDDs are a far better and cheaper way
of
backing up data for the home user. The HDD can be re-used and if the HDD
is
plugged in (which can be harder than inserting a DVD) then the
availability
is almost instantaneous.

guv wrote:

How much would you consume fitting all these HDs you would need to
buy? Burning a 4.7GB disc is hardly an issue. Even at 2x its only 30
mins. Go get yourself a 16x burner if you are counting seconds.

I find DVD media to be incredibly unreliable.

Using a pretty nippy PC, a £300 (at the time) Sony DVD burner and £1 a
pop branded DVD media.

I've had discs that haven't burned/verified okay, then a few months
later gone back to them and Windows just sees them as empty media. They
may have one or two scuffs on, but nothing a CD would complain about.

DVD's I've bought from stores have become unglued after little play.

They're an absolute waste of time, and a very much over-hyped medium.

"guv" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 21:20:49 +0100, "half_pint"
wrote:

I think you are correct HDD's are cheaper, also you excluded the cost of
of a CD burner so you can add another £20 or more, much more
to the CD option.

Who mentioned CDs?

no one as i mentioned later :O)


Then you have to consider the huge ammount of grief you will get from
CD's (burning problems, scratched disks, disks which won't work,
CD writers which wont work .....well read this group and you will
get the general idea).

No one I know that looks after their media has any problems. Probably
best not to use them as beer mats.

Tell me about it!! They are a pretty fragile media as is a cd burner,
one scratch or a spec of dust and its all fooked.


Then there is the time cnsumed bburning your CDs, how would you
cost that? Several hundred pounds?

How much would you consume fitting all these HDs you would need to
buy? Burning a 4.7GB disc is hardly an issue. Even at 2x its only 30
mins. Go get yourself a 16x burner if you are counting seconds.


Not good for audio, even converting mp3 to.wav takes an age (on my ancient
machine)

Then there is huge problem of storing, locateing, indexing of the
CDs.......

Why is it a huge problem? The 200GB hard drive you mention, is only 40
discs. Go by yourself a 200 disc folder and have the equivalent of 5
of your 200GB hard drives.


I have about 80 cdr's finding a file on one of them could take *hours*.


Now start working out the costs.

200 discs will cost you £48, plus £50 for the burner.


How much will 5 200GB hard drives cost you? How much storage option do
you get once they are full?

Oh I see I am talking about CD's not DVD's but the argurements are the
same except DVD burners are very expensive.

Very expensive? Best not shop at PC world then. They are available for
just over £30.


All you get from burnable media is grief and coasters.

You 300DVDs are 3 meters high and hardly portable!!

Your 300 DVDs hold 1,200GB of data. How many hard drives are you
buying? How are you going to connect them all?

I think burning media is a dying art, in 3 years time
a 200GB drive will be what? £20?

Oh ok guys. Wait for 3 years and all will be well.

Well I ws mainly talking about CD's but DVD have the same problems.

I cannot use my computer whilst burning and thats a problem.

My older cd drive dont work anymore either (occasionally works).
Its just too much hassle.
LIfe is too shor to burn media!!!

How long will it take you to find a file on 300 DVD's?
A month?

I have a big box full of floppies, another full of CD's
do i want another full of DVD'S?



--
www.senaction.com

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage NoSpam wrote:
guv wrote:

How much would you consume fitting all these HDs you would need to
buy? Burning a 4.7GB disc is hardly an issue. Even at 2x its only 30
mins. Go get yourself a 16x burner if you are counting seconds.

I find DVD media to be incredibly unreliable.

Using a pretty nippy PC, a £300 (at the time) Sony DVD burner and £1 a
pop branded DVD media.

I've had discs that haven't burned/verified okay, then a few months
later gone back to them and Windows just sees them as empty media. They
may have one or two scuffs on, but nothing a CD would complain about.

DVD's I've bought from stores have become unglued after little play.

They're an absolute waste of time, and a very much over-hyped medium.

I could not agree more. Yet for some reason there are people that
keep kidding themselves about what CDs and DVDs a Cheap,
mass-market media with the lowest reliability the manufacturers
think they can get away with. I wonder whether the perople that
do not get this are trying to convince themselves that their
set-up is reliable. Denial is not a good strategy to approach
a technological question!

I get the urge to buy a DVD burner about once every two months
or so. Usually does not take much research to get rid of it
again.

What saddens me is that it looks like blue-ray is going the
same way: The cartridge is likely to be dropped, a massive
indicator that price if a far bigger concern than reliability.

I will stay with 3.5" MOD for my critical stuff and RAID5 + copies
on several computers for less critical stuff.

Arno
--
For email address: lastname AT tik DOT ee DOT ethz DOT ch
GnuPG: ID:1E25338F FP:0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws" - Tacitus

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage half_pint wrote:

"guv" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 21:20:49 +0100, "half_pint"
wrote:
[...]
Oh ok guys. Wait for 3 years and all will be well.

Well I ws mainly talking about CD's but DVD have the same problems.

I cannot use my computer whilst burning and thats a problem.

My older cd drive dont work anymore either (occasionally works).
Its just too much hassle.
LIfe is too shor to burn media!!!

How long will it take you to find a file on 300 DVD's?
A month?

I think that is the key issue here. Of course you can do copies
of all data to 2 or more media. of course you can verify all
your media once a month and re-burn those with problems.
(Incidentially I do complete surface scans of most of mu HDDs
once a month, but that is completely automatised...).
But how much time will that cost? How mind-numbing will the
process be? Better get a job flipping burgers in that time
and buy external HDDs for the money earned!

I have a big box full of floppies, another full of CD's
do i want another full of DVD'S?

I recently copied all my ATARI ST floppies to one MOD. Took
almost forever but now I can find stuff and there is no
media decay anymore.

As for CDs, I find that I burn very few. Most of those are boot-CDs
(Knoppix), making copies of my (bought) music CDs or copies of student
theses to be included in the printed versions. I recently started
putting Knoppix on CD-RW (700MB CD-RW finally being available) so it
will be even less now.

Arno
--
For email address: lastname AT tik DOT ee DOT ethz DOT ch
GnuPG: ID:1E25338F FP:0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws" - Tacitus

"guv" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 03:59:36 +0100, "half_pint"
wrote:

Then you have to consider the huge ammount of grief you will get from
CD's (burning problems, scratched disks, disks which won't work,
CD writers which wont work .....well read this group and you will
get the general idea).

No one I know that looks after their media has any problems. Probably
best not to use them as beer mats.

Tell me about it!! They are a pretty fragile media as is a cd burner,
one scratch or a spec of dust and its all fooked.

Solution. look after them!

Then there is the time cnsumed bburning your CDs, how would you
cost that? Several hundred pounds?

How much would you consume fitting all these HDs you would need to
buy? Burning a 4.7GB disc is hardly an issue. Even at 2x its only 30
mins. Go get yourself a 16x burner if you are counting seconds.

Not good for audio, even converting mp3 to.wav takes an age (on my
ancient
machine)

Eh? Is it the fault of DVDR media, that it takes ages to convert wavs
to mp3? Might that be the same process time storing to your HD?

I can play from mp3 on my pc, I won't buy a cd player (.wav) ever again
only mp3 playing devices, so I will never need to convert.


Then there is huge problem of storing, locateing, indexing of the
CDs.......

Why is it a huge problem? The 200GB hard drive you mention, is only 40
discs. Go by yourself a 200 disc folder and have the equivalent of 5
of your 200GB hard drives.

I have about 80 cdr's finding a file on one of them could take *hours*.

So use some catalogue indexing software. Or is the issue you cant find
the discs because they are all over the place?


Whatever I have tried alll that, its too much hassel and it
doesn't get done when you are in rush and it is a job in it self.
How many hours (days more like) will it take to catalogue 300 DVD?

And then you cannot reorganise your files as you can on a HDD


Now start working out the costs.

200 discs will cost you £48, plus £50 for the burner.


How much will 5 200GB hard drives cost you? How much storage option do
you get once they are full?

Oh I see I am talking about CD's not DVD's but the argurements are the
same except DVD burners are very expensive.

Very expensive? Best not shop at PC world then. They are available for
just over £30.


All you get from burnable media is grief and coasters.

You 300DVDs are 3 meters high and hardly portable!!

Your 300 DVDs hold 1,200GB of data. How many hard drives are you
buying? How are you going to connect them all?

I think burning media is a dying art, in 3 years time
a 200GB drive will be what? £20?

Oh ok guys. Wait for 3 years and all will be well.

Well I ws mainly talking about CD's but DVD have the same problems.

I cannot use my computer whilst burning and thats a problem.

So because you have an "ancient PC" that wont use burn protection,
that writes of DVDR as a media does it? I always do other things at
the same time I am burning and have yet to have one buffer underrun
through doing so.


Ah so I heed to add the cost of a new PC into the equation now?
Well thats another £500 minimum, mind you as it will have a HDD
inside I won't need to burn!!


My older cd drive dont work anymore either (occasionally works).
Its just too much hassle.

Sounds reasonable to suggest you get a new CD drive then. ;-)

Well I find HHD's infinitely more reliable so I will invest my money
in that direction, incidently that is not the original CD drive, the
original failed within the first year and I got a free replacent. So in
My experience they are not very reliable (also have a failed
portable CD radio thing).
And whilst it *may* be my fault they failed, none of my
HDD's have ever had a single problem!!!


LIfe is too shor to burn media!!!

Since a 52X burner will take a few short minutes, how is that too
short?

How long will it take you to find a file on 300 DVD's?
A month?

Nope. Seconds. They are all in keep cases (apart from the 2nd back up)
and on a shelf and clearly marked.

Seconds? you have to read 300 lists, you must be a quick and flawless
reader, like my PC find files function.
It is a major hassle manintaining allyou lists and puting the corect
CD in the correct box.


Oh and another advantage is the fact my Hard drive doesnt fit in my
set top DVD player! ;-)

Yes but you don't need a set top DVD player as you can play
direct from your PC.

I have a big box full of floppies, another full of CD's
do i want another full of DVD'S?

But all your floppies and CDS will fit on a couple of DVDRs so it
sounds like another box isnt necessary in your situation.

Dont think I would trust a CD or a DVD, wont take up
much space on a HDD though.

--
www.senaction.com