The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

You have a Blu-Ray burner backup to BD's it will be cheaper in the long run! I get media for around $1-2 and you can get several DVD's on a BD.

 

They don't have a bd burner. Yes, I do. I guess I can offer to back their stuff up to BD-RE. But i'm having trouble with the one I have. Formatting it seems to be a problem. Which is fine. 2X burn speed is rather slow...

 

Through the years i have went from 3x500GB to a 4x1TB RAID5 setup using an expansion card. I had issues using WinXP and gigabyte mobo drivers to achieve any raid array, but that was many builds ago. Perhaps it was my lack of knowledge on that subject back then+my impatience...Maybe i will play around with some spare parts soon and attempt that software array again, I've been wanting to buy an ATX case to put my "old" rig (x38 mobo+ q9450) into.
Any sharp looking cases on sale lately?

 

Some MB's can be difficult with RAID the newer board are much better though and you'll find options for both 5 & 10 levels. The older boards it was typically just 0,1, & JBOD. I've setup RAID 5 with Gigabyte before on older MB's so it can be done.

 

2000 dual layer discs would be completely unmanageable (and ludicrously expensive!) to me. My server might be a bit heavy to carry, but it's a lot more compact than all those DVDs!

 

Why would you do that when you can get 3+ DVD's on a BD25 for the same price or cheaper than a DL-DVD? 2000? or 200 even with an array of disks 2000x8.5GB=17+TB's seems a little much. If you divide that by 3 you would have only 666.7 discs, The Devil... I would still backup to disc's otherwise some day you'll be doomed, Murphy's law.

I don't have problems with scratched disc as I use proper handling, comes from the old days handling alblum, never pinch hold by its side only. Same goes with optical discs. Plus I always have a backup ISO image stored normally too. If you do it as normal operation you don't end up with 200 discs not backed up and a real task to do so. If you want to buy a new hdd(s) and store to them and put away only to be used for backup then that is fine too but your safer backing up to disc I think as long as it isn't cheap disc that breakdown with time fast.

 

Here in the UK at least, BD-Rs are about £2 each, making them only marginally cheaper per GB than DVD+R DLs (£0.08 per GB versus £0.11 per GB). For the 16TB of data that will fit on my server, that's still 640 discs, or £1280. Compared to the £624 I paid for the hard disks (never mind that they're only £480 to buy now!) that's more than double the price. Having two sets of redundant hard disks, with all my data either in a neat stack, or in one PC I can take with me, I still don't see the attraction of the discs, especially when at those prices they only come in spindles with no boxes to protect them in. Using recordable media for mass storage is a very pre-2005 way of doing things.

 

2005 is a long time ago, like Cretaceous era I believe? LOL I would put that estimate closer to 2006/07 when hard drive prices started to really go down. I remember around 05 thinking i don't wanna start spending extra cash on DVD-DL, maybe i'll wait till next year and see what Bluray has to offer. I never really thought of Bluray as permanent storage, more like the newest 8-track tape.

 

2005 is when I set up my 2x250GB stripe (yes, I wasn't very bright back then ) and I've been storing stuff on mechanical drives since then. I didn't really start collecting much multimedia until after that, my prior CD/DVD collection wasn't particularly excessive.

 

I've never thought of DVD-DL being viable as it has always been too expensive. Even from before BD's hit the market I've thought of their size or better yet potential size being a great archive tool. I've always used DVD's to archive as they are cheap and easy and if I'm using them as an archive a spindle works great, I wouldn't want jewel, slim, clamshell, or 14mm cases for that, paper would be fine though too. You miss the times when floppies were used and you might have a 100 floppies as a backup, them were the days. You can mail order disc's cheap, you don't have to go to the local store in the UK to get your discs so there is no real reason you have to pay more than me, but whatever. I even order discs from Asia some times, but you have to be careful there as quality can be a big issue.

I’m fortunate as most of my movies I bought, and some rented, so I have the original, but still two backups, an ISO and one I use to play in normal use. I have around 500 to 750 and now 200 Blu-Ray as I don’t waste my time with DVD anymore.

 

but the need to search through 200 discs rather than a hand full of hdds is alot easier, hell if the hdds are in thr PC or in a server no need to search, just type the file name you ned in the search bar.

 

This is mail order prices, not in-store prices. Those ARE bad.
I can double click the drive I want, wait a few seconds for it to spin up (not necessary but done for power saving / noise purposes) and then easily find what i want in an alphabetical list, or just search, and then it's all ready for me. No faffing around scanning through the spindle one disc at a time to eventually find the disc I want, then putting it in the drive and have to put up with the noise of the optical drive reading the disc.

 

HDDs and media Players WD LiveMedia Player and 1 tera byte HDDS
I burn very few Discs anymore , mostly TV series after I watch them , maybe one in 25 movies are about the only ones worth keeping . EXAMPLE : just watched a Danny Clover movie ( Age.of.the.Dragons.2011 ) . But in all due honesty it was a cheap knock off of MOBY DICK , Maybe worth watching, but not worth keeping

MKV Is the way to go

 

If you're archiving you shouldn't need to shuffle through a spindle all the time so that's not an issue, but even if you need to recover a disc from a spindle I would have them cataloged alpha-numeric so it wouldn't be too tough to find what I need. There is no noticeable noise of an optical disc in my player so maybe you need a better player?

Now if you are talking about playing movies on a normal basis I have a 400 disc Sony that works pretty good but it can be sluggish sometimes getting to your movie however I'm not trying to play 2000 movies and for that even though I don't prefer the PC for playing movies a movie server would be the way to go with a good catalog program.

 

I totally agree with Sam. Discs do have their place, but thousands of discs could become a bit extreme. I have a storage container on my desk that could easily hold 2000+ discs. If I had to start expanding on that, that's really where you need to think if discs are the best option for backups. After the recent problem with a hard drive, i'm very nervous about similar happening to any one of my drives :S
5 2Tb drives take up considerably less space than thousands of dvd discs. The only way to feel safe doing it though, is to keep 2 hard drive backups for each piece of data. I sure would feel better purchasing even larger drives though. It's difficult to organize as much as I have on multiple drives. A couple of 20 - 50Tb drives would be a godsend!

 

Different Question : I just bought an ACER Aspire 5552-5898 their recovery program is 4 full DVDs. Just got off the phone with ACER, they said it was an OEM Computer and would not furnish a Win 7 Disc. That if I had problems with the operating sys I'd have to use their recovery Discs 16gigs. Which I think is a load of CRAP. All I want or need is the operateing system and my own products on it. Does anybody know how to raise hell and just get the Operating system ...THE BACK OF THE COMPUTER HAS A Product Key

 

You can't get a windows disc from a system builder, it's not allowed in the license. If you need to reinstall the OS and don't own your own copy of windows, you need to either buy a recovery disc, or your own copy of windows.

 

I don't watch things on DVD players, they run off an HTPC. I store games, TV and music, not just DVDs.

 

If you organize proper from the start these things don't snowball into what you are dealing with now and the expense isn't bad, but the security is much better. As you have found hard drives are not infallible but of course even store bought movies aren't either, even if you've never played them, but it doesn't happen very often. Storing spindles or boxes of paper sleeve backups isn't that bad but you are right large hard drives take less space however they are more dangerous for storage. It's your gamble and before you had these hard drive problems I'll bet you would have sworn that hard drives never go down too and are safe, but they aren't!