Price Guides May 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage
by Kristopher Kubicki on May 2, 2004 7:18 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
DVD Burners
Now that you've bought your massive new hard drive, how are you going to back up that much data? CDs certainly won't be much fun if you have more than 1-2 gigs to back up (even with HD CD at 1.4GB a disc) and tape drives are slow dinosaurs of the past. Thankfully, DVD burners have come down in price almost where CD burners were little more than a year and a half ago. In fact, there are still some 4x DVD burners that cost *less* than a few CD burners.
Since we have all grown accustomed to blazing fast CD write times, we won't even discuss 4x DVD burners at this point, but instead jump right into 8x. With a total capacity of 4.7 gigs per disc and media prices slowly falling DVDs are finally becoming a viable medium for sending large files to friends or family and for making backups. The ability to make backups of your expensive DVD or game collection so that the kids don't scratch up the originals is worth the investment on its own merit.
Our recent DVD roundup goes into full detail on the exact performance and quality that you can expect from six different models. As you may recall, the NuTech DDW-082 won the Editor's Choice award in that roundup and certainly wins the seal of approval for its price as well. For $75 you fairly decent media compatibility, 8x DVD-/+R, 4x DVD-/+RW, and 4x DVD-/+RW (we can only dream of the day when the industry and marketplace chooses +, -, or something else to settle on) burn speeds as well as very acceptable CDR burn speeds of 40x. The media compatibility really isn't too much of an issue since most buyers tend to at least get a brand they recognize to help avoid filling your living room with 4.7GB coasters, no matter how amused guests may be. This drive can easily replace every optical drive in your system without losing any noticeable performance on CDs and while getting great DVD performance. If NuTech isn't your thing, the NEC ND-2500A/AOpen DDW8800 are also excellent drives for the price, but generally burn slower than the DDW-082.
Another interesting burner to consider is the LG GSA-4082B; simply because it's the cheapest triformat burner around. DVD-RAM isn't a particularly widely support format, but most new PC DVD drives are shipping with read support for DVD-RAM so the option is there if you need it.
And what about DVD Dual Layer that we reported on a month ago? Patience grasshopper. First samples will be showing up at review sites this week, but issues of media and software support still concern us. DVDR-9 (DVD Dual Layer) will also be considerably slower than the 8X speeds (and soon 12X speeds) on the market right now. With 8X DVDR-5 drives as cheap as they are (and falling), media practically free and software support mature, why wait?
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operator - Monday, May 10, 2004 - link
[quote] Do you mind playing a 1 in 10 chance of loosing your data for single digit percentage performance increases? [/quote]Sounds like someone doens't know the difference between losing and loosing.
Zak - Sunday, May 9, 2004 - link
Quote:"Concerning RAID: often we are asked if it is worth it to buy two 36.7GB drives and RAID them together for performance. Our answer is no; the performance increases are minute, but your stability issues are horrible"
Hmm... I run 2 Hitachi SATA drives in a RAID-0 on a K8V Deluze mobo and I'm getting reads and writes in excess of 100MB/s, games and apps launch noticeably faster, not exactly a "minute" increase. PATA RAID-0 was not that much faster but SATA RAID-0 nearly doubles the speed like SCSI does as far as I can tell. Agreed though that the chances of loosing data is higher, but this is my gaming/audio/video machine and I don't keep valuable data on it.
SocrPlyr - Wednesday, May 5, 2004 - link
i forgot to mention about the unsecure data cable... i don't know about your uses but the ones i have used have snapped in very very tightly, maybe it was just the cables that i was using but i actually had problems removing them...Josh
SocrPlyr - Wednesday, May 5, 2004 - link
quantai would have to say the make good points but most of those things hold true for PATA as well... so they aren't anything new...
Josh
quanta - Tuesday, May 4, 2004 - link
It seems everyone overlooks the potential problem with current generation of SATA drives, which is highlighted at http://ata-atapi.com/sata.htm . BTW, Hale Landis works on the ATA/ATAPI standards, so I have confident with his info. Other than that, the connector is not really secure, which can lead to data loss, is not fixed until SATA-2, and only on external SATA units.mechBgon - Tuesday, May 4, 2004 - link
Kristopher, I really am just pulling your leg about the SCSI stuff :) I know no one wants to hear about SCSI due to the high cost-to-capacity ratio. To each his own...Slingman - Monday, May 3, 2004 - link
Kristopher,I can't seem to get solid info on this anywhere, and your article really caught my eye since I was hoping to get an answer to this question. There are many of us that were holding out for the "new" 36 GB raptors based on the same mechanics as the 74 GB version, with the fluid bearing motors and all.
Is there any word on whether or not these drives have actually hit the retail channel yet and if they have, where to buy them? Conversely, if they haven't, when are they expected to? A couple of months ago I had read that they would be shipping in April, but April has come and gone without a formal announcement. Thanks for the writeup.
AtaStrumf - Monday, May 3, 2004 - link
Well in EU I pay more like $1,75 per disc, and if I want to get some quality It costs me $2,50/disc. And yes that is US dollars!So I think you all should just thank your lucky stars!
Jeff7181 - Monday, May 3, 2004 - link
Sorry for being anal... but since when is "RAID" a verb? =)KristopherKubicki - Monday, May 3, 2004 - link
True Absolut, but if you go to best buy you can find them for even cheaper after rebate.Kristopher