Quote:
Originally Posted by GenjiChan
External Drives well likely be infected accidentally. Why do they burn if it ain't gonna last for so long. Probable it depends on how you take care of those Dvds right?
|
It does, but to have a long lasting DVD:
1. You need an expensive high quality burner
2. You need relatively expensive High Quality DVDs
3. You need to burn at a slow speed (which takes
hours).
4. You need to store it somewhere that cool and far away from the sun.
Otherwise your DVDs will just conk out. Frankly, HDDs are a lot less trouble. And the time saving in particular is huge. DVDs are not quick to burn unless you have industrial equipment to do so.
There's a risk of your HDD being infected with a virus at some point, but it's very unlikely. I've never had an infection that actually harmed any of my files and forced me to delete any.
And really, downloading them all again through Bittorrent will probably be faster then taking them off a DVD again.
Don't forget, DVDs are not quick to read like a HDD, and when you have substantial numbers of them they're very difficult to organise.
Stick to HDDs. And HDDs are so incredibly cheap now anyway. You can buy a terabyte external hard drive for 100$. So buy two, and put the back up in storage somewhere. So long as the storage is clean and cool, that Hard drive should last a long time. And it will be significantly cheaper then DVDs. A 50 disc spindle of DVDs will set you back 15$, that's 70$ for a terabyte. That may seem like less then a HDD but bear the following in mind:
1. A 2 terabyte drive is maybe $140, rendering the price different moot
2. It will take significantly longer and significantly more effort to transfer data to DVDs and organise it afterwards. Time is money! I'd estimate at least 30 minutes work per DVD (and that's convervative). That would be 110 hours of work for a terabyte of data. With Blu Rays it's a bit better, but Blu Rays will set you back significantly more cash
Disks are passé. Stick to a hard drive. Replace it every 5 years or use a RAID and you're set.