Question about pocketable hard drives...

[karinatwork]

Hi!

I know, this is a little off-topic, but I ask my question anyway: I am thinking about buying a pocketable, external harddrive with USB connection to my laptop. I intend to put all my digital photos on this harddrive. How reliable are those external hard drives? Someone told me that a hard drive will always fail... the question is WHEN rather than IF.

So should I invest my money in something like that, or rather buy a DVD burner and burn a bunch of disks?

Thanks for any advice. I am running out of storage. :)

Karin

[Janak Parekh]

A hard drive is useful as fast random-access storage, but not for permanent archival by any means. If you're looking to archive these photos, definitely go the CD/DVD burner route.

--janak

[masaki]

Hard drives can fail. You can't really tell when a fail will occur.

I'd suggest burning your pictures onto CDs/DVDs. This is what I do with my pictures now. I used to use a 1GB Microdrive to store pictures I took on my digital camera using my iPAQ. Then the microdrive died one day. Lucky I had backed up the old files onto my desktop and was able to recover most of the deleted files on my memory sticks. You might also want to look at some solid state storage media like CompactFlash (not as large in capacity though). I believe it is quite reliable but rather expensive comparing to a hard drive.

Just my opinion.

[upplepop]

Don't rely too much on CD's either. A study by a Dutch PC magazine (http://www.pc-active.nl/toonArtikel.asp?artikelID=508)(in Dutch) of 30 different brands of CDRs has shown that some CD-Recordable discs become unusable in under two years. Make sure you spend the extra money to get quality CDRs and burn at a slow speed. Some good brands are TDK, Yuden, Fuji, HP and Mitsui.

Roughly translated from Dutch:
The tests showed that a number of CD-Rs had become completely unreadable while others could only be read back partially. Data that was recorded 20 months ago had become unreadable. These included discs of well known and lesser known manufacturers.

It is presumed that CD-Rs are good for at least 10 years. Some manufacturers even claim that their CD-Rs will last up to a century. From our tests it's concluded however that there is a lot of junk on the market. We came across CD-Rs that should never have been released to the market. It's completely unacceptable that CD-Rs become unusable in less than two years.

On the image you can see the exact same CD-R. On the left you see the outcome of our tests done in 2001. On the right you see the same CD-R in 2003. The colours indicate the severeness of the errors in the following order; white, green, yellow and red whereas white indicates that the disc can be read well and red indicates that it cannot be read.

[Janak Parekh]

Don't rely too much on CD's either.
Well, there are so-called "gold CDs" which are specifically designed for long shelf life. Those media should long outlast a hard drive. I have to say, I've been burning CDs for years and have never experienced a 20-month shelf life... it's possible I've been using good-quality blanks all along.

--janak

[maximus]

I have to say, I've been burning CDs for years and have never experienced a 20-month shelf life

Same experience here. I have been writing CDs since the old age, and these CD backups (audio CD, data CD, video CD, etc.) are still usable at present. I am sure some of my CD backups are 3+ years old.