The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

fragile optical media, Hmm, let me think about this for a moment, I have seen my kids throw, scratch, stain and do almost everything else less wipe their butt with them, and they could still play, try and do that with a hardrive.

We went thru this before lol, we all know disc's if properly taken care of will outlast hardrives 10 fold, I mentioned before, I think I got close to 4000 movies, sure it would be a lot easier to stack them on hardrives, but after doing all the work getting them, not to mention the cost, and they are important to me and my family, and have the option to let whomever watch what they want to watch in whatever room using a dvd player is very accessible and easy, other wise you would need a pc in every room in the house.

I had this discussion with Russ one time, I told him the day I stop using disc's would be the day I could insert an external hardrive into a dvd player like a disc, but would still worry about the longevity.

But he got me on this one, he said Fred you can almost already do that, I think he mentioned a docking station or something to that nature, sent me a link to view one, I was flabbergasted, didn't even know something like that was available, so my argumentative ammunition with Russ almost came to a halt, like I said he got me on that one, but still, maybe because of fear, about the longevity etc, so for now I'll still stick with what I'm doing.

 

Yeah I've got a hotswap dock for hard disks, it's really handy. The whole point of hard disks though is that you don't have them lying around where they can be thrown, dropped etc.
With them all in a PC you never need to ever leave anything lying around, it's all internal. If you want proper power-isolated redundancy, just find a cupboard to leave them in, check them every few weeks/months save for the drive you're backing up new data to and you're fine. It honestly is less hassle than optical media...

 

You obviously don't know how to handle media so no surprise on your bias and as I've stated it is much easier to just use hdd's but more dangerous too, again optical media is more secure. I have tons of backups some of which I should throw out because they are beyond there usefulness. I'm not lazy I backup as I go so it's not a pain in the butt or at a point that I can't manage it. I guess if all I did was DL from the internet and never take the time to organize it my collection might be overwhelming too.

Because I do this I don’t need extra hdd’s that just sit around and I would never keep my main backup in a running PC unless it was only turned on for backup purposes. Like Creak says to each his own and my own won’t be doing what you are, as I’ve been burned by the hard drive perils. Your time will come and then it will be too late as it happens with most people, lessons by hard knocks!

 

Right on Fred but Russ isn't totally right about a docking station as you can pooch a hdd in a docking station if you remove the drive when you shouldn't or a virus decides to attach itself. Again a hard drive is vulnerable how often have you screwed up an optical disc pulling it out without safe releasing it or just popping it out in mid play? How about never!

 

Well their is that good old fashioned way ! Write a letter and let the postman deliver it
YA KNOW WHAT WE DID B4 CELL PHONES ( WE HAD FUN, & ENJOYED OURSELVES of course their was that old fashion answering machine waiting on ya when you got home )But at least you could enjoy your dinner out and a whole movie...Now a days you can't sit through a movie without someone around you talking and disturbing you with there PHONE...Ya ask them to please move or quit talking and your the Motherfu#$er. They are the ones who feel they have been inconvenienced, and push it off on you

 

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Sammy lol, you don't have kids, you put nothing pass nothing with them, maybe one day you will know what I mean. Today when I got approached by somebody that's pregnant, I don't say congratulations, I offer them my condolences.

 

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Makes sense to me Stevo, good point.

 

Sorry DDP, that wasn't my intent I could careless how many posts or threads I have but I'll be more carefull next time.

Stevo

 

I think this conversation has run its course. If you have kids and you let them mess around with everything, sure perhaps optical discs are more robust. If you actually have some form of control though, mechanical storage is a lot easier. I find the idea that a virus would never end up on a DVD laughable, but that's another story.

 

So you are coming around to the point that optical is more safe, which is true, and hdd's are the easier path but again not so safe. Very good Sam we are making progress.

My point has always been this what is more safe, not easier, but you have tried to say that mechanical media is safer and easier which is flat out wrong. Some day you'll get hit by copying data to another drive for backup finding out that some of the data is corrupt and then loosing your original drive, then you'll be screwed. It's happened to me and most people I know or deal with it is just a matter of time and lazyness.

 

That's not what I said...

 

I think that is what you said even if you were not conscience of it!

You coming around you're just not aware of it. LOL

 

Well, by all means take half my sentence so you can spin what I said out of context. The rest of the sentence illustrated that optical discs are more robust for a specific example. The rest of the time though...

 

That example works in all instances sorry but you can't have it both ways...

 

There is no doubt that hard drives can be easier than burning discs every time you add to your library. I too use them for storage and normal usage and have no problem with others that do so. And to each his own on how you want to roll the dice too. We all gamble to some degree but a smart man knows when he is taking a gamble and anytime you use mechanical anything over a non-mechanical device you are gambling to some degree. Of course optical media has its hazards too but they are much more limited than any mechanical drive, obviously or it should be obvious.

So when someone argues against physics and nature it becomes quite lame, this is where I have issue.

 

Oh people will find faults in anything. I look at both technologies cautiously. What I mean is, either could fail. It's a matter of preference, habit, and knowledge. A person that has had a lot of trouble with Optical media, and not with hard drives, is likely to trust HDD's more. A person who has had trouble with HDD's is gonna trust optical media more. Myself, I've acquired a comfort with both technologies. I have an intimate trust in both technologies. The damn velociraptor is gonna make me nuts though! I think I have another one being finicky. I'll probably find out this weekend. What I plan on doing is dumping one of my 1Tb drives, onto a 2Tb drive, and cloning my Velociraptor to the 1Tb drive, and running it that way for a time. I believe i'm getting a kind of intermittent connection. Eliminating the V-Raptor could allow me to discover a problem

 

Well yeah, creaky hit the nail on the head. DVDs and Blurays are fine for small to medium amounts of data, while not necessarily better than hard disks they're no worse. However, once you go beyond a certain point, for example the 13.5TB of data currently stored on my server, optical media just becomes completely impractical. The argument that optical media's more reliable than mechanical storage is flawed, end of story. Where people get confused is from experiencing mechanical storage done wrong, i.e. not backed up. If I lose a drive that's been backed up, I just put the backup in, then buy a replacement disk, or RMA the bad one. Fortunately, I haven't ever lost a drive to one failing (though I have damaged disks in the past due to faulty cables - again no data was lost as it was backed up!)