From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Mon May 26 2003 - 10:27:41 MDT
Spike, if you're backing up more than the puny 4.7GB DVDs can hold, or
working with a lot of data from video editing and such then a better
idea might be to purchase a removable 80GB or larger hard drive. You can
either get a frame for it to install into one of the front bays of your
computer case, or get an external drive that you can attach via firewire
or USB 2.0 (your new computer probably needs to have a firewire port
anyway for connecting your digital videocamera). This will give you a
lot more extra space to play with when editing large video files, and
will also let you back up large amounts of data extremely quickly and
without having to annoyingly swap out multiple DVD blanks.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030411/index.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030116/index.html
The main reason I could see to get a DVD burner at this point would only
be if you want to make DVD movies to play in an external DVD player, or
if you are going to be permanently archiving such a large amount of data
over the upcoming years that it causes the cost of a DVD-R burner + a
lot of DVD-R media (the cheapest media type) to eventually dip below the
cost per GB of a series of cheap removable hard drives. There also is
the stability issue... hard drives may only last 5 years, while DVD-Rs
might last 50. But if you are mainly just doing temporary backups and
don't plan to permanently archive anything then this isn't relevant.
-- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/
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