Hard drives vs DVDs, $ per GB: Tie

[johnridley]

Newegg had 1TB Hitachi hard drives on sale for $75 and free shipping yesterday.

I pay about 30 cents for a DVD blank, and I typically leave about 300 megs unused on every one I burn. So a 1000GB drive is about equivalent to 250 DVDs, space-wise, and is a heck of a lot more convenient and takes less time to deal with than sorting out all those files to go onto DVD. Those 250 30c DVDs would cost....$75.

Also, in my experience anyway, hard drives are FAR more reliable than DVDs.

I need to come up with a good system for playing media off the hard drive, probably with the MythTV box because the set-top DVD player only understands FAT filesystems, and though FAT32 will technically do 2TB, I'm not sure it's a good idea.

Comments

[scs-11.livejournal.com]

I agree with your math, but consider the failure modes as well. Lose a DVD, lose a DVD. Lose the hard drive, lose all the DVDs. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but I think the real breakeven point is when you can get a pair of drives for the media cost.

Right now I burn DVDs in pairs. One goes to the basement, one to my office at work. Thus my costs are the same as buying a pair of drives. But taking one drive back and forth between house and work to update it, not to mention inserting/removing from dock, probably radically cuts drive life.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

If we're going to talk about that, I need a pair of DVDs as well (as you say) so the cost still works out. I recently copied about 600GB of stuff from DVD to a 1TB drive, and I had significant failures.

I am running two drives with anything I don't care to lose. There is a LOT of stuff that I have that really I don't care that much if I lose. Several terabytes of documentaries, for instance. I like the stuff and watch one at random from time to time, but if they all just went away one day, I'd utter a curse and keep going.

I am actually running THREE hard drive copies of critical stuff; that is, family photos and video, and my "My documents" folder. I was running two, but I decided that I wanted three for a couple of reasons:

1- I want an accessible backup, plus an off-site backup
2- I realized that a misconfigured piece of software or some other problem (lightning strike, etc) could fry every drive in the system - if it happened when I had the primary and the backup plugged in, I'm boned. If I have TWO backups, there's never a time when all three copies are in the machine at once.

I also have a DVD-R copy of family photos, just for good measure.