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Switching formats
Feb. 17th, 2009 09:30 amI've decided to move to swappable hard drives for storage of some media at our house. With terabyte drives at $99 shipped (for the WD Green drive I prefer; even cheaper for some other brands), that's about the equivalent of 45 cents for a DVD worth of data, whereas I'm paying 36 cents for a DVD.
This will save a lot of time, both in cataloging and burning DVDs, hopefully remove the problems I've had in the past with bad DVDs losing data after a few years, and make it easier and faster to retrieve stuff. Also, the hard drive is a lot smaller than the DVDs and binder it replaces.
I have a SATA hot swap docking bay that will make this pretty easy. I'm going to start with audiobooks and audio/video courses; that's currently about 200GB, but there are another 100GB pending. I'll probably also archive podcasts there for shows that I am likely to listen to again (I actually do throw some things away after a while, though I'm sure some people wouldn't believe that).
I am somewhat concerned about a drive crash, but I'm going to try to be careful not to put anything on this drive that I'd be very sorry to lose, or that I couldn't get back again at need off the net. I expect that in time drives will get down to where I'll be OK with keeping a duplicate.
This will save a lot of time, both in cataloging and burning DVDs, hopefully remove the problems I've had in the past with bad DVDs losing data after a few years, and make it easier and faster to retrieve stuff. Also, the hard drive is a lot smaller than the DVDs and binder it replaces.
I have a SATA hot swap docking bay that will make this pretty easy. I'm going to start with audiobooks and audio/video courses; that's currently about 200GB, but there are another 100GB pending. I'll probably also archive podcasts there for shows that I am likely to listen to again (I actually do throw some things away after a while, though I'm sure some people wouldn't believe that).
I am somewhat concerned about a drive crash, but I'm going to try to be careful not to put anything on this drive that I'd be very sorry to lose, or that I couldn't get back again at need off the net. I expect that in time drives will get down to where I'll be OK with keeping a duplicate.
