Digital BW, The Print

Barrett,
That is very true about the drives today.. I have attempted to do a fair amount of homework in these areas as for me I've chosen to use hard drives as my back up choice.. but in reality it goes deeper then that. 
Here we have chosen to go with Seagate drives.. I'm not suggesting that they are the best drives but for me they have worked out to be a partner.. We are still using SCSI , a little IDE but mostly SATA these days.. We have a lot of them.. The fact is the new larger content drives do represent more wear and tear on a drive also .. If we look at how we are with data today versus say 5 years ago it's very different. Many are literally adding GB's of info on a monthly basis.. plus we're accessing it much more..  Seagate has reduced their warranty period from the previous 5 years to what it is now. Drives are just getting used more.. They were never designed to be permanent.. they have always been an expendable item. On the plus side they are incredibly inexpensive today so storage cost is literally peanuts as far as I'm concerned. The key is that we just have to be responsible and realize that these things are subject to failure.. It's not about if their going to fail it's about when.. How many here have a 3 year old computer that is still very active and have not replaced the drive just because they should do that.. Not many I'll bet. Today we should think different, it's time to get over the new infatuation with the computer and start getting that it's merely a tool and it's wears out so some level of maintainence is necessary. Most or many computers today can be ordered with a built in raid and dual drives mirrored.. It'll cost about 200 extra but that is an incredible start on the right path to a viable future in data redundancy.. 
I have a small slick little oh God I'm going to say the bad word... "HP" media center  ( I'm not an HP fan)  At any rate this thing has been a disaster with video cards but  it still going and doing a job.. It has mirrored drives.. about three weeks after it's third birth day.. the little RAID  cop inside informed me that I'd lost a drive.. So I ripped it apart and replaced the bad drive.. By the next day the canary was singing.. I have a new second drive in standby now but will wait until the traffic cop says to switch it... Constructively, that process just seems to work. What's more it makes sense.. 

jimbo

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Barrett Benton 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Friday, February 11, 2011 1:06 AM
  Subject: [Digital BW] Re: CD/DVD failure?


    
  From a freelance IT tech's perspective:

  - Hard disks simply don't last as long as they used to. This may be a 
  byproduct of both vastly-increased capacity of current HDs combined 
  with their commodity status, where one can buy a 1TB internal HD for 
  under $100, and the fact that profit margins on HDs are nowhere near 
  what they once were (the "real" money is in SSDs now).

  CDs and DVDs, in fact, *aren't* all the same. I've settled on using 
  Verbatim DataLife Plus CD-R/DVD-R media, which hasn't failed me yet 
  after years of disk burning.

  - Barrett


  

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