The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

I still use the disc method but as soon as the possibility of using HDD's is feasible for us we're going the HDD route. 3-4 1TB externals to start with will house MOST of my movies and make the space needed for those dang discs almost NIL!!!

Yep OMEGA.... don't brag on something unless you wanna jinx it!! LOL. btw it doesn't take much with those POS Rapters!!! lol. Oh.. and calling a car a POS works too... I still have my 1994 Toyota Camry (180K miles old) and she's still strong... but it's a POS just to keep it going. LOL. I have a newer car now so I gotta sell me Camry tho.

Happy Building!!!

 

Oman7,
And far less reliable than an HDD, IMO! I could be wrong, but I don't think there is any kind of error correction dealing with bad sectors or remapping them as there is on an HDD when you are writing to a DVD. It seems to me that an HDD backup or cloning an HDD would be best.

Russ

 

Agreed. Discs also quite easily get scratched, or more commonly, lost.

 

Mine don't get scratched. I baby them. I store them in envelopes. And in the last year, I haven't had one bad burn. If great care is taken, dvds are more reliable to me.
I've had 2 Hard drives fail that were WD, and 1 that was a seagate. The only seagate I ever bought too. I just don't like having all my eggs in one basket. What can I say LOL!

If there were 10Tb hard drives, I would reevaluate my process. as it stands now, organizing massive archives on mere 2Tb hard drives is more trouble than its worth. 10Tb drives would be easier. And I would simply clone one of those drives, and be content

 

More trouble than thousands of DVDs?

 

~1300 isn't that bad. You're probably right though sam. In fact, you've really got me questioning my process now. But the disks only take up ~15-20% of my desk.

See...I have this thing about alphabetical order. And well, with multiple drives, that presents a problem in my opinion. "S" would take up a good portion of one of my drives. Therein lies the problem If I had a 10Tb drive, it would accommodate all of my disks easily. And with Blu-Ray, it wouldn't take long to fill a 10Tb drive :S Though compressed with X264 it wouldn't suffer much, and would greatly save space

I guess I could keep a list of said dvds, and put a code next to there respective title. E.g. Drive A, B, C, etc. That way, when locating specific data, I can find it in relatively short time.

 

Why would you ever sort your drives by alphabetical order? Sort them by content, makes far more sense. TV A-M, TV N-Z, HD Films A-M or whatever.
No point grabbing BluRay raws, just get rips. 8-18GB a piece instead of 25-50.

 

Content? My moms the same way. Action or by actors. But what if you end up with a movie that has multiple big name actors, You know? I go by title with my envelopes, because I'm good with movie titles. I already have a list of my entirety. That way if I want to watch or remember a movie, I can see quickly if I already have it. It also makes it quick for counting Wordperfect can count how many lines there are in a document.

I guess to each his/her own

 

So you only store films then, never TV or games. That's the only time it makes sense to store by title.

 

Actually.... LOL! I do have select few tv titles, but I'm sure their discs will survive for a great while. The brand I used has a very high success rate, and very low error rate( I heard once upon a time, that they make the industries -ROM discs). And I checked every one of them. The only way they get screwed is if I lose them (unlikely), or if they get scratched.
I'll tell you what. If the first WD20EARS does well for me, I'll likely buy multiple others. I do like the prospect of 10TB+ of storage in my tower. I could probably go more, if I convert the 5.25" bays to accommodate Hard drives

Imagine an SSD drive designed for a 5.25" bay. WOW! As long as a GPU! You're talking some serious Gig-age! Or some serious Terabytes! <-----Drooling

Pard me while I throw something out there for google, since this job is making me friggin nuts. The xbox that I am modifying does not have T8 screws!!! It has T6. NOWHERE else is it on the web. I can't believe that. Perhaps when my buddy sent it to M$ for repair(RROD), they updated the HDD screws with T6 to detour upgrade efforts There it is guys LOL! Now google can find it.

 

SSDs aren't that big. They aren't even big enough to warrant being 2.5", but that's the closest standard size. Physical space is pretty redundant, it's just protection from damage really. Right now it'd be ludicrously impractical for all my TV to be on 485 dual layer discs, and for me to have to comb through them if I wanted to watch a series. It would be even more impractical to have to change discs three times to be able to watch a long HD film. There's just no place for optical media in 2010, at all. It simply has no use. It baffles me why people still have even two optical drives, let alone half a dozen.
Actually I thought T6 screws were used in quite a lot of things, xboxes included, but perhaps not :S

 

Ummm, heh heh. Optical drives have their uses. Even half a dozen. With half a dozen, I can leave the room for a longer period of time, while the computer runs the entire queue No, I'm not mass producing discs. I'm simply lazy for long periods of time. And have a lot to backup. Plus each optical drive has its own quirks.

 

All the more reason not to use them...

 

LOL! Touché. But keep in mind, its um, eh hem, a legitimate excuse. plausable deniability

 

£18.18 from CCL for 25 Verbatim 8x DVD+R DLs, without cases.
9GB a disc, that's 225GB for £18.18, again without any means of storage.
9TB of discs is 40x that, so £727.20.
9TB of 1.5TB HDDs is 6 WD15EARS drives, or 6x£62.93 -> £377.58. Not only that, but they all fit in a large computer case. 1000 DVD+Rs, not so easy.
Of course, if you have, say a 1000 disc box, that's fine. However, if you want more than 9TB, then what? Suppose you want to up it to 12TB? Well, a bigger box maybe, but I haven't seen any boxes that take more than 1000 discs, so presumably a second box, and more discs, another £242.40 worth. To upgrade those 1.5TB drives, either buy two more, so £125.86, or if you're starting from scratch at 12TB just make the same drives WD20EARSes, £128.82 extra.
So, it's £970 of discs, plus at least £50, probably more like £100 for two colossal disc boxes plus the PC that has to play them, or it's £506 of hard disks, that fit inside the PC that would be needed anyway.
I could buy the hard disks with physical redundancy (i.e. buy them all twice) for the same money as the optical drives.

 

I hate to seem like I'm arguing.

1300 discs ~6Tb

610 USD total using discs and envelopes, and 8 total optical drives used.
719.92 USD (redundancy) 1.5Tb x 8 Hard drives
719.94 USD (Redundancy) 2 Tb x 6 Hard drives

the 1300 discs cost me ~390$ at an average of 30 cents per disk. Usually less. The optical drives cost me roughly 25$ each. My current array of optical drives will probably not quit for quite some time. A pack of 1000 envelopes cost me 20$ (Windowless). I haven't transferred them all there yet.

The way I see it, is spend a little more, and not have to deal with the hassle of multiple optical drives, and the ease of a few clicks, and it's show time.

My experience with hard drives has been slightly less then perfect :S

 

I agree with omeg, I have over 3000 movies all on DVD's, to me it's no problem at all, I keep them marked, sleved, pictured, all in alphabetical order in cases, any time a family memeber wants to watch a movie it's no problem, they know a name of a movie and it's right there in alpha order, imagine my kids wanting to watch a movie from a hard drive, setting it up would be a nightmare to watch on TV especially in different rooms in the house, and nobody in this household would watch a movie on a PC monitor anyway yukk!

The disc's will outlast any HDD on the market today, you get to little amount to save on a HDD especially when you start to aquire many, than to be safe you need backup, you got to be kidding me that it's more convient to keep them on a HDD, of course each to his or her own, me I like the shortest, easiest, safest and the most convient way, no PC expert can tell me any different, if it swims like a duck etc. I have friends that do the HDD thingie with thier movies, Iv'e seen it in action, no thanks. Unless I see keeping them on HDD's turn simplistic my disc's stay put. Your still doing the right thing Omeg.

 

oman7,
Just an idea, but I think I would get a very large drive and one the size of the boot drive. Clone the boot drive and put it away somewhere Safe. Save all the files you want to save on the large one, then put it away! Use it periodically to back up more stuff, but don't leave it hooked up all the time. I have an eSata to Sata cable and the power adapter that came with my motherboard, so it should be easy to hook up, and I can Hot swap it with the GigaByte Sata ports. something like this would be very reasonable.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136534

I think this would be about as safe as you can get. It would cost a lot less and take up far less storage space than a Terabyte worth of DLs or DVDs. Much faster too! I have True Image 8, and it does a great and fast backup if you want to compress the files. That way you could do a periodic backup of all your files. Saved my a$$ a couple of times back when I had my E6750. Very fast drive to drive as well. With Movies, I would prefer to just copy them to the the big drive as is!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Even a large drive (2Tb), I'd fill it up quickly. What can I say, I'm a movie nut LOL! I think I'm gonna give the WD20EARS a shot, and if it fails, I'll return it to Western Digital directly. That way they send me a drive. I get the feeling they make sure I get a GOOD one back

 

Fred,
I'm sorry, but that's just Bogus thinking Fred! Especially if you use a backup program, then it's no contest at all. I'm not even sure you can get a program that backs up to DVDs directly, but even if you can, all it would take to ruin the entire backup is a couple of bad sectors and your backup would be worthless. If you are direct copying to DVD it would take you a whole bunch of time. It's interesting, both True Image 8 and 9 claimed to back up to DVD, but They don't mention that there's no way that I know of to format a dvd to UDF format. Even if you could do it with a re-writable, I wouldn't. HDD backup is by far the safest method available today!

I've lost one HDD in 22 years that failed. One that was in a computer my Dentist gave me that was still under warranty, and one that a cheap $29 PSU blew out on me. I can't ever remember having to RMA a customer's HDD in a build I sold them. That's well over 400 builds. The only other drive I ever sent back was one "Air Mailed" about 40' into my front yard by Fedex! Fedex bought me a new drive!

Me, I'll stick with 500GB drives. I can store over 100 DVDs on one, and when it's full I'll pull it and get another 500. Even if I was to go larger, I don't think I would go larger than 1TB. There seems to be a lot of problems with the majority of larger drives. The 500GB drives seem get much better reviews, with far less reliability problems. The one I have is the WD5001AALS. It's quiet, runs cool and doesn't vibrate. Comes with a 32MB Cache. I like it!

Russ