Any experience with DVD burners?

[EugeneK]

I am using a new D60 and am trying to put all the pieces together for the work flow. Playing with the camera (Raw files) I am filling a CD every 2 days. I need to ugrade my CPU and am seeing DVD burners / CD burners (Dell). Does anyone have experience with these. Are the DVDs erasable/rewriteable or are they write once. Can you write data then later append more to it. Are they reliable. Thanks -Eugene

[Roger_Cavanagh]

Eugene,

I can give you one "do not buy".

I have a Toshiba DVD-RAM. It uses rewritable DVD's in cartridges (so you can't copy Lord of the Rings :) ). I bought it one day on an impulse because it was cheap (GBP150) compared to DVD-RW (at about GBP450). I would not recommend it. Write speed is _slooooooooooooooooooooow_ and since the price/mb is not that great, I hardly use it. At 30 pence each, CD's are cheaper and faster than this DVD-RAM system.

Regards,

[EugeneK]

Thanks. I think i will upgrade my hardware without DVD burner and wait to see how well they work. -Eugene

[Rustle]

Yeah, I'd agree with Roger. DVD burners are great if you're working in digital video, but they aren't worth the cost for pure storage. If anything, I'd be inclined to purchase a couple of large hard drives and a RAID card for backup purposes. Mind you, at two days per CD, a 100GB drive would only last you a year before it's full. You'll probably want to stick with CDs...

Russ

[brutal]

Pioneer is really good at making CD and DVD r/rw's. They have dvd rw burners that burn 4.7gigs per disk and one model will burn both sides for 9.4 gigs.

I will tell you storing on a HD is a bad idea. On tueday I had a fat table fail and lost 15gigs of stuff. I backed up all my photos to cd last week so I only lost my email, a ton of music files and other stuff. It would be a catastrope if you lost a years worth of photos with a hd crash.

[Pekka]

brutal wrote:
I will tell you storing on a HD is a bad idea. On tueday I had a fat table fail and lost 15gigs of stuff. I backed up all my photos to cd last week so I only lost my email, a ton of music files and other stuff. It would be a catastrope if you lost a years worth of photos with a hd crash.

HDD is safe if you have two or more physical disks where you have copies of your photos. Same thing with any backup system, don't rely on just one backup, do two or more and store them on different places.

I have built a network between two PC's and the fileserver PC has removable IDE bays, so I can move the drive to another location if needed. Of course I do CDR backups from time to time, but only from RAW's, not TIFF's.

About DVD drives: local magazine "tietokone" ("Computer") rated Aopen RW 5120A best for value, and Philips DVDRW228K for speed and quality. Interesting note was that most drives are actually same hardware in different plastic.

[Rustle]

If you're willing to spend the money, a RAID setup can be one of your most reliable storage solutions. Depending on your setup, it can also increase your disk performance. The most advanced setups will detect when a hard drive dies and allow you to change it without turning off the machine, so there's no downtime. Put in a new disk, and it just keeps going.

Of course, that's totally unnecessary for most people out there. But cool, nonetheless.

This link has an excellent explanation of the benefits of each type of RAID setup. Something that any paranoid digital photographer should consider, as you'll always be covered against data loss.

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

Russ