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Posted by John on 07/12/06 21:58
>I agree, in principal, with Ken. I have about 4 tB of MPEG2 &
>MPEG4ish video on DVD, @ about 4:3 :: RW:R. This would fit on
>eight 500 gB drives and the roughly 7 cubic feet of DVDs would
>become about 1 cubic foot of HDD.
>
>500 gB drives pre-packaged in external (USB or firewire)
>housings are about $250; sans housing somewhat less.. The
>number of DVD discs involved is over 800, so the hard drive
>alternative is roughly twice the replacement cost of the DVDs +
>their mini jewel cases.
>
>Of course it's a lot easier to make the HDD choice today than it
>was 6 years ago when not only prices of both media were quite
>different, but hard drive capacities were not comparable. In
>this regard, I envy your newness to the fray;-0)
>
>However, from the point of view of damage, losing one or a
>couple of 4.3 gig DVDs is trivial when compared with an
>unrecoverable HDD. Of course many HDD problems are
>recoverable, given the tools - but since 2000 I've only tossed
>one DVD that became unreadable. Some others which became
>unplayable were still copy-able. Having made one bad choice of
>external HDD (a now discarded Maxtor 200 USB) I can attest to
>the value of being current with backups.
>
>Other advantages, for those who capture TV to PC, is to edit
>from the capture machine directly to an external. The MPEG2 is
>then "ready to play" and ready to move. If reprocessing to
>MPEG4 is desired, then the external drive can be easily moved to
>another system - as the capture/playback machine is relatively
>low power. The output of the recompression is directed to an
>archival external drive - from which it can be backed up to
>whatever media you deem appropriate.
>
>Whether you choose HDD or DVD as your storage medium you will
>need an index to what's stored - this stuff grows by leaps and
>bounds ;-0) I chose to keep mine as an alphabetic HTML page
>with links to either IMDB or a few of the TV episode catalogues.
>Since I use a PC as the video player now, I can call up this
>page on the main viewing screen to make selections from the
>numbered DVD discs. The links to descriptive materials are
>handy refreshers.
>
>Finally: your friends and neighbors most likely can not borrow
>one of your HDDs to play at home, so you're keeping within the
>letter of the law;-0)
Thanks for the responses I appreciate it. Perhaps I will consider a
new drive instead. I think maybe I should just use the DVD to burn
home movies for distribution to family and friends etc.
I don't think I will need quite that much space in storage though. I
don't have that many DVDs. I have captured a lot of video though to
MiniDV of family, friends, travels etc.
I'll have to work out what I can afford for a hard drive because I
wouldn't be comfortable without having a second to back up to incase
the first crashed. I'm not sure if Data Recovery prices have come down
much in the last few years? I'd probably guess that they haven't very
much.
So are SATA drives generally considered the best (fastest) at the
moment? Are external USB or FireWire Hard Drives any good or are they
a lot slower than internal SATA and ATA drives?
And the drive enclosures that are on the market in abundance... Do you
just buy a regular internal SATA or ATA drive, put it inside the
enclosure and then you can attach it via USB or Firewire? Would this
method not slow it down or does it work quite well?
Sorry for the 101 questions and thanks for the help with this.
John
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