What would YOU do with a 50GB RW Disc?

[abbadon]

I'll start this out with my thoughts. One of the first thoughts would be multiple movies and only disc, but then again I like having 1 movie per disc. I guess storage of data would be nice, like backing a hard drive. I know off hand, other than it would be cool.

[Joe Fenton]

Use it to mail 900 byte messages to my relatives. ;) :D

[nFury8]

Originally posted by Joe Fenton
Use it to mail 900 byte messages to my relatives. ;) :D
:D :D :D

[Seimour]

And with a 500GB one (http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/10860) ? :D

Well it would be a nice idea to make a back-up of my entire collection of divx/xvid movies, it'd be a pain in the arse to loose one of my own hardly made releases :p

And if you want sth even larger see here (http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=104415&highlight=holographic+disc)

[neo75903]

backups! it is ideal for today's large hds.

[Mug Funky]

start shooting movies in HD... rip all my DVDs and play them back through a PC (with a decent TV-out, obviously).

500gb would be NICE. but what kind of transfer rates would it require? personally, i'd be using it to store stuff in 4:2:2 lossless, maybe HDTV sizes.

[edit] but when discs get this big, it's important not to trust them too much. i've already got a big pile of unreadable DVD-Rs.

[fccHandler]

I don't have any unreadable DVD-Rs yet (as far as I know!), but I do have quite a few unreadable CD-Rs from only a few years ago. What is up with that? Some were TDK, which I assumed was a quality brand.

At this point I'm really pessimistic about the future of optical disc formats. Magnetic disks seem much more reliable to me. I've never lost a hard drive myself (though I know people who have). Furthermore, magnetic tapes seem to last forever. I have 17 year old VHS tapes which are still perfectly watchable...

[Mug Funky]

hmm. i've lost hard disks. quite a few.

if you've got a stable power supply with nothing much plugged into it, and you care for your hard disk, then it'll last for ages. but it doesn't take much to lose data, even if the rest of the disk is fine.

as for DVD-R being unreadable... the media itself is okay, but no drives can read it. it's like fekking cinderella, trying it on in every drive i find, to see if one can read it.

magnetic media is pretty stable, but here's some food for thought:

the geological record shows that the earth's magnetic field flips itself north-south every so often. there's currently not much known about why this happens, and, though the flipping average is about a milennia, it is a chaotic function and not predictable in any way but relative probability.

and looking at the record, there hasn't been a flip for a few thousand years. apparently we're overdue for one.

now, one thing we don't know is how fast the polarity changes - ice core samples aren't exactly high res. there's 2 extreme possibilities. (a) it flips very slowly and gradually. this is good news for magnetic media, but bad news for us - there would be a period of time where the field is zero, and as such hard radiation from space will not be deflected from the earth. worst case here is a mass extinction. this doesn't seem too likely, judging from the fossil record. (b) the field flips very fast. this would induce a current in every electrical circuit in the world, and possibly also fry and/or blank and corrupt all magnetic media on earth. rather similar to the EMP that accompanies nuclear blasts (an upper-atmospheric missile test once damaged circuits over a very very large area - hawaii to new zealand).

hehe. perhaps we should go back to stone tablets? :)

[neo75903]

Any chance you have a part time job as script writer for hollywood?
Dont worry guys, The core showed we can survive :)

[Mug Funky]

lol! you know they don't make anything but sequels or remakes...

i'd have to convince hollywood that my script were actually a sci-fi book written by L Ron Hubbard in the 50's... then i'd even get John Travolta playing a major role :)

either that, or i could say there was a japanese horror flick based on it done 2 years ago. i could call it "the earth grudge ring".

[fccHandler]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
hmm. i've lost hard disks. quite a few.
How does that happen? Do they just die instantly, or a little at a time? Are there any warning signs?

I'm still using a 15 GB Maxtor in my old Win98SE computer. That drive is in its sixth year I think, which is ironic because it has survived longer than many of the CD-R backups I made of it...

[neo75903]

Many factors can ruin a hd.

-high temps shortens lifespan.
-vibrations, transport.
-electric charges,unstable power supply.
-and ofcoz wear out, it is still mechanic and a law says where there is friction you have wear outs.

[Mug Funky]

for me it's all of the above.

plus i give my machine a good kicking every now and then when it misbehaves... :rolleyes:

[neo75903]

lolz,
i have read somewhere that kicking your pc is stress releaving. Look it as a medical treatment. Your pc shop will understand :)

[Selur]

if the discs wouldn't be expensive I would:
0. buy a burner that supports the babies ;)
1. backup my dvds
2. backup my 'small tools' folder :)

[Tuning]

If I got a 50GB disk, I would carry my precious movie collection whole over the planet. :D WITH DTS/XVID in 2MB/second encoding.

[crahak]

Originally posted by fccHandler
How does that happen? Do they just die instantly, or a little at a time? Are there any warning signs?

I'm still using a 15 GB Maxtor in my old Win98SE computer. That drive is in its sixth year I think, which is ironic because it has survived longer than many of the CD-R backups I made of it...

You're lucky. I had a 80gb die on me again 2 months ago (the sad part is, it was part of a drive array on my server, so everything went *poof!*). The drive was probably past the warranty time by a whole hour :angry:

With a 50 (or 500) GB drive, I'd finally have an easy way to backup MPEG2 TransportStreams of HD stuff. I could finally backup my drive arrays (who wants to spend a couple days burning a spindle or more full of DVD-Rs to backup their drives?). Not like tape drives nor the media is cheap nor overly spacious.

Mind you I got some friends that would rather say, "backup my PetaByte of pr0n" :D

[neo75903]

Originally posted by crahak
You're lucky. I had a 80gb die on me again 2 months ago (the sad part is, it was part of a drive array on my server, so everything went *poof!*).

Not using RAID level 5 heu :), i am glad i did that from the first instance. had random dropping out of drives due to a fault in the bios of my raid controller. The drives were fine, but every reboot was like a russian roulette. Luckely, never failed more then one drive, simply take out the drive in question, and plug it back in, rebuild and done.
Risk here is not to crash the system while rebuilding. ow and also not to pug out the wrong disk :)
Bios updated a half year ago and not a single drop outs anymore.

Still i use to other drives to backup the raid, just in case ...

[crahak]

Originally posted by neo75903
[B]Not using RAID level 5 heu :)/B]

The old promise FastTrack controller doesn't do it. Next "round" of upgrading my PCs I plan on using it, at least for my server, and keeping my important stuff on it. I've been very lucky this time as most of what I lost was some HD MPEG2 TransportStreams.