based on experience, I can't trust too much on hard disks...
I lost a long recording session because my laptop dropped while
recording to disk in the field and the disk become unreadable.
Unfortunately, hard disks can fail even if they don't drop... Four
years ago I bought 8 HDs of the same brand and model for recording
underwater sounds during a research cruise: it was a bad series: half
of them become unreadable in few months. Fortunately after having
been backed up. In another set of HD recordings, one out of 6 become
unreadable and the copy, on a different brand, as well.
On the contrary, all copies on CDs and DVDs are still readable after
more than 10 years. According to Murphy's law the original that died
along with its backup was not backed up on DVDs!
Lesson learned: Murphy's law accompanies us every day. I become
paranoic, I keep three copies on HDs of different brands, as soon as
I have enough time, I do a copy on DVDs too. I now bought a Blue Ray
burner to make copies easier, but long term reliability is still unknown.
When CF where much more expensive I also tried with CF HDs.... very
bad experience. The first failed after two days, it was replaced by
the manufacturer, the new one failed in a week, replaced again, it is
still in his box. I don't know if it works or not....
But sometimes there are disks that works forever... I have some 10
years old disks that work every day and never failed!
Never had problems with CF, maybe I was just lucky...
Concerning the drive in the 722... when I'm moving I prefer to record
to CF. In a short time CFs will have more GB than the
drive... maybe it is possible to replace the HD with just a CF;
there are many IDE-CF interfaces around... but never tried.
Gianni
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Gianni Pavan
Centro Interdisciplinare di Bioacustica e Ricerche Ambientali
Universita' degli Studi di Pavia, Via Taramelli 24, 27100 PAVIA, ITALIA
Phone +39-0382-987874 Fax +39-02-700-32921
Email
Web http://www.unipv.it/cibra
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CIBRA organizes the XXI IBAC Congress, Pavia, 15-18 September 2007
http://www.unipv.it/cibra/xxi_ibac.html
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