Is it cheaper to buy a slew of blank DVDs to start making room on my external hard drives, or is it just cheaper to invest that money into buying ANOTHER external hard drive?
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Is it cheaper to buy a slew of blank DVDs to start making room on my external hard drives, or is it just cheaper to invest that money into buying ANOTHER external hard drive?
11 replies on “Palmer Asks…”
Blank DVD’s are cheaper storage, but less convenient.
What are they at now a quarter for 4.7G? Or are they cheaper than that, there are probably more things to consider.
Your time organizing them to DVD’s (how much is that worth.
Shelf life of DVD’s vs HD (I don’t know what the comparisons are), ie. when do you have to think about replacing them.
M
Ok, so let’s start chatting. I want answers!
So you’ve identified that blank DVD’s are cheaper. Let’s say 25 cents for a 4.7GB. So for 250GB, I would need 54 blank DVDs which comes out to $13.50.
Clearly in terms of pricepoint, it is the clear winner. But you have brought up a good point in the time spent on organization, and might I add, access. It’s a heck of a lot easier for my media center to grab access to my hard drives to find a TV show than it is to find the old DVD and copy it to the media center. That being said, what are people’s thoughts on this? Is ease of access worth the extra price?
Oh yes, and what is the shelf life of a blank DVD? I definitely know there are a few DVDs I have from a few years back which I can’t read anymore. Was that just a fluke, a scratch, or is there really a 4 year shelf life on these things?
I think the pros add up more for the side of the harddrive. Ease of access, longevity, and physical storage seems to rule the harddrive as better.
54 dvds will take up a lot of ‘shelf space’ and imagine having to sort through each dvd to find the one show you are looking for? painful. whereas with a harddrive you could just use the OS’s ‘find file’ program.
Tis true, it’s more convenient. Just costly. So in the end, it is up to me to determine whether I want ease of use, or easy of the wallet. PLUS I need more USB ports! 😉
If any of you are looking for a great deal on an external drive. There is a 1TB external drive on sale at NCIX for $200.
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=28600&promoid=1034
Scratch my last comment as they have sold out of the TB drives.
To make room, buy a harddrive. It’s not any more susceptible to failure than your current harddrive.
If you were looking at backup solutions, where you keep a copy on computer and store a copy in case of hardware failure, then I would say DVD because it does not fail for the same reasons as a harddrive. (you can drop a DVD and not really worry about whether it will still work…)
Final question for the forum….what does palmer want? ease of a hard drive or the bulkiness of 50 DVD’s
have you used partition magic to make a space on your hard drive so that you can make an img of your hard drive as a back up on your exisiting hard drive or external HD?
HD.. much more practical… no question.
I think Palmer wants a new TB drive!
my 2 cents.
I want ease of the hard drive. But the costs are getting crazy, or the amount I download is getting crazy. I just bought a 500GB in January and it’s full, but that is full of edited videos that Vero was working on. Actually, now that I think about it, SHE bought that hard drive and I hijacked any iota of space left on it for my own uses!
I have not yet enabled any backup of my HD which irks me. I was using Time Machine on the Mac at one point but then something went wonky and I stopped but before I got a chance to start up again, I started filling up the hard drive again!
So…thanks for your comments all! Looks like I want the external, but may just opt for the DVDs as most of the stuff I’m backing up are things I won’t look at for a long time.