LeeJend

I have DVD's dying of old age and want to bulk storte them on a HD. Need a reliable one but 500 GIG plus units seem to have a 10%-15% infant mortality rate so I'm hesistant to go as big as I need.

Please advise and vote.

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American Zombie

You are gonna store on HD only?

If so and this is really critical data then I would still store a copy on DVD.

bmclaughlin

How much are you willing to spend and how important is the data?

Personally, I'd go with an e-sata Raid enclosure, with 500 gig disks set up in Raid 5. That way if one drive fails, you can just replace it and all your data is still intact.

LordOfLA

Hard disks are more reliable than DVD. Unless you are willing to pay a premium for premium made Optical media the bio-dyes and layer binding glues deteriorate dramattically over time and can destory the disks.

Smaller hard disks are cheaper, faster and longer lived. - just make sure to run something like GRC spinrite occasionally over the disks to read/write-back the data to counteract the earths tendency to erase magnetic media over time.

Larger disks though convenient are more prone to substantial data loss.

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Johnny

Yeah, if you are going to do something like that I would get a raid setup with the best redundancy available .. Then if a drive fails, you won't lose all the data ..

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LeeJend

The plan was to burn DVDs to watch and then keep a backup on a HD for when the DVDs get flaky. The HD would be external and only be connected when I wanted to clear off my regular hard disk.

A few percent of my saved movies become unreadable after a while and a few more got scratched. There has been no pattern with media brand, just a few that randomly go bad after a few months. Some of those I lost were good ones and I don't feel like paying for them again. Since HD long term storage is highly reliable I felt it was better than burning 2 sets of the DVD, though that is an option.

Eventually I will get off my lazy butt and put together a multimedia server but for now I'm looking cheap and fast. I can do a 1T external for $120. Also, I do not like wasting the electricity an always on server consumes. Color me Green.

Mainly I was looking for feed back on the reliability of BIG, non-redundant hard drives. I have never had an issue with a drive under 160gig failing.

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tdinc

I bought one of these for backing up my video files and i am very happy with it
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822204079

was going for the western digital but people I know found this one a bit better because of the eSATA. its good enough until you build you media center.

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Johnny

I want to get a drobo system ..

http://www.drobo.com/

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tdinc

the drobo is nice,,, but you can build a cheaper and better media center with eSATA drives w 4 port bay

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Johnny

That is true, tdinc. But at least it is an option ......

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tdinc

w00t!

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