[Ham-Computers] RE: Adding a DVD burner (questions)

[Philip, KO6BB]

Thank you Aaron,

I'll look into the availability of the Pioneer and Plextor drives.  My 
preference is to "buy locally" or via phone rather than over the Internet as 
I 'really' don't like sending out my credit card numbers over the net.  Even 
though I "put together" my Systemax computer from Tiger Direct through the 
Internet, I was able to talk to them on the phone to complete the deal.  So 
that may be an option.

Though I'm still concerned about being able to read the disks later on when 
I may have a different machine, perhaps if I standardize on a brand of drive 
that will never be an issue.

The MAM-A DVDs do look like a good product, with their gold plating etc. 
At about 149.99 for a 50 count spindle of 4.7GB DVD's they should be good! 
They supposedly have a 100+ year longevity, in other words, would outlive 
me.  Perhaps a "one time" purchase to archive the best (and most difficult 
to replace) part of the library would be a good move.  Then use less costly 
DVD's for the routine backups.

I HAVE to do something.   Quite sometime back I lost a LOT of OTR that I 
haven't been able to replace again when a "power surge" shut down my 
computer during the dubbing to external drive process.  Somehow I lost 
access to a number of "genre directories" (each genre contains many 
different program directories) on my "D drive" where it's all kept as well 
as had to reformat the external drive which had become corrupted.  A 
scandisk also disclosed that the power flop had also corrupted the "D" 
drive.  After reformatting the external drive, I copied all the files I 
could to it then reformatted the D drive before resuming.

I'm REALLY not sure why entire directories on the D drive would have 
'disappeared' when copying from it to the external drive.  I would have 
thought that just "reading from" the drive, a power failure wouldn't affect 
it any.

If I read what you said below correctly, it appears that SATA drives are 
MUCH slower than IDE drives, (about 33 or 66 times slower) at least through 
their interfaces.  I thought they were faster.

Again, thank you Aaron.

Phil

----- Original Message ----- 

Philip,

The media compatibility issue still exists, and is probably worse today than 
it was a couple years ago.  As manufacturers need to make lower cost media 
to compete, out goes quality.  You can find "quality" discs fairly easily, 
but drive compatibility still needs to be tested.

As to drives, I prefer Plextor and Pioneer drives.  A typical dual-layer DVD 
writer costs about $50 these days.  The Plextor's are more expensive, but 
they're typically considered the cream-of-the-crop.  LG makes decent 
lightscribe drives, if you want lightscribe (LS).

Is LS worth it?  Don't know - the media costs quite a bit more than even 
ink-jet printable media.  Looks OK if you view it from an angle.  Wears out 
the laser sooner though, if you think about it.  But for $50, you could 
always buy another drive if it burns out.

For "archival" quality backups, Mitsui makes "archival grade" media known as 
MAM-A.  They use a 24K gold reflective layer and are scratch resistant.  You 
can find MAM-A via on-line media retailers.  Not cheap by DVD-R standards - 
still over a buck each in bulk.  You can get more info about MAM-A media 
here:

  http://www.mam-a.com


So, to answer your questions numerically:

1.  I generally recommend Pioneer or Plextor drives.  The current Pioneer 
model is the DVR-112D and Plextor has two "800" series models.

2.  I'd install the new DVD-R drive on the "primary" IDE controller as a 
"master".  Then I'd probably remove one of the CD-R drives and keep the 
other on the secondary IDE controller as a "Master".  I currently have two 
DVD-R drive in my system though I really never use both at the same time.

3.  Keep the external HDD on the Firewire port.  Yes, they are slower than 
internal drives as the interface is slower than internal IDE/SATA.  1394a 
(Firewire 400) is 400Mbps and USB 2.0 is 480Mbps max (bits per sec).  Don't 
let this fool you into believing that USB 2.0 is faster though...USB has 
much more protocol overhead and the actual througput is higher with 1394a. 
For reference, ATA/100 is 100MBps max (Bytes, not bits), SATA is 1.5Mbps 
(bits), and SATA-II is 3Mbps (bits).  For the bits per sec rates, just 
divide the bps rate by 10 (includes some overhead) to get the Bytes per sec.

4.  Personal preference.


73,

  - Aaron, NN6O