On 29 Mar 2005 09:41:55 -0800, "Keith Jewell"
wrote:


Attach bullseye here wrote:
Until recently, I've gotten away with using a Conner Peripherals hard
drive
of ~820 MB and even a 127MB drive from a PC/AT and the current stable
is 2/3
1998 and before and includes ISA cards in some cases. I believe the
high
RPMs and increased stress brought along by improved storage
technologies
bring on an earlier demise. Few of my devices or cards are newer than
1999
or 2000. I've never had a CD data backup fail. and I believe such
problems
are analogous to the CD rot troubles of the commercial audio
industry. I am
certainly not so cavalier as to leave them out and about like some
audio CD
consumers. I HAVE had CD failure and haven't gotten around to
investigating
it with the mfg. That disc took about 8 years to fail also. Proper
maintenance is always a good thing but proper selection of suitable
equipment seems more so.

CD-R quality really does matter. I haven't had any problems with the
gold discs I bought for a dollar a piece 8 years ago, but a few of the
silver uncoated ones that friends have given me have become completely
blank. Also, had my first DVD-R fail the other day, a cheap unbranded
one that someone sent me. Those are supposed to be more durable because
they're enclosed entirely in acrylic.

However, as to hard disks, I'll take the faster, fails more often
drives any day. For one, I've got 400 gigs of data online (entire CD
collection ripped losslessly, digital photos), and that's just not
possible with the smaller drives. But for two, the new drives are so
fast and so cheap - most of the new motherboards will do hardware
mirroring, so for around $100 you can have 40 gigs of totally
redundant, very fast storage (2x40g 7200rpm drives). They don't even
use a proprietary format, so if the motherboard dies, you can retrieve
the data with any machine, since each hard disk is just a duplicate of
the other. And by fast, I mean transfer rates 10x faster or more than
those old drives, and seek times almost twice as fast. But they do fail
more often. Still, using RAID and decent backup strategies, I haven't
lost a significant amount of data since I was using a 2gig HP SCSI hard
disk.

-Keith

I just got a Maxtor 120 GB 5200 for about $30.00 from Tiger. Low
speed but probably more reliable then a 7200. Ideal for an image HD
Vlad