At 9:51 AM +0100 5/1/11, Chris Edwards wrote:
>
>
>On Sat, 30 Apr 2011, Rob Danielson wrote:
>
>| ~4 years ago I found several web sites with tests of burners with
>| several criteria measured. There were significant differences between
>| burners.
>
>Right - and good luck buying a 4-year old burner model :-)
Hi Chris--
The few reviews I read yesterday suggest to me there are still
significant performance differences in today's models. One can still
find 4-5 year old drives for sale. Makes some sense that a drive that
does not also burn double-layer and BR could be more mechanically
reliable at handling vanilla DVD-R's.
>
>Personally I have little faith in recordable DVDs in the long-term.
>Plenty disks I wrote a few years ago are no longer readable :-(
This may be consistent with the poor burner/media combination
observation. Quite a few burners create disks that will not
consistently read on other burners. 4X and 8X burned disks more so.
When I noticed this at a lab and on an early iMac and a Powerbook G4,
I looked into the matter. After settling with the Pioneer
DVR-107D/T-Y silver discs combination, no disks have failed to read
even on other drives. I'm burning disc #3064 as I type.
I'm more confident about these optical DVD-R disks than I am a boxes
of IDE hard drives that hold material.
>
>One thing I've been told, by an ex-BBC person, is that the "rewritable"
>DVD media may actually be better, because the chemistry involved is
>different, and lasts longer.
I think the pits can be read more reliably for a period of time but I
don't think the longevity is better than gold/silver media with
phthalocyanine dye.
>
>But as has already been said, the only way to be sure is to periodically
>copy stuff to fresh media. Hence I now keep everything on live hard
>disks.
Smart, but if one has more than 3-5 drives, drive to drive
duplicating is quite expensive and tedious. I'm risking letting the
optical disks do that work for me for the next 20 years,..
>Amongst other advantages, when the time comes, copying stuff will
>simply involve a single "drag'n'drop" type operation on my computer, which
>should be MUCH easier than copying loads of DVDs one by one...
For sure! As of this month, I've started keeping the field recording
originals on 1TB drives too for this reason. Rob D.
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