Sony sued again....This time it affect many people.

[soulmata]

Actually, despite the bullshit rampant in this thread, the truth is that the shelf-life of a mechanical disk (and magnetic storage for that matter) has always, and still does, vastly exceed typical writeable optical media.

Optical media is (excluding hi-def media currently) vastly cheaper than mechanical and magnetic storage. There's a reason for that. A plastic coating covering a thin layer of solidified dye does decay faster. While numbers vary significantly, most burned CDs and DVDs show signs of decay after only a few years. You can test this yourself by looking at how many more read attempts it takes an optical drive to read a particular sector on a CDRW that is only 3 years old. I have hundreds of CDs I burned back in 99, on media ranging from quality (at the time) to generic. Many drives no longer accept the discs, some do with many retries, and some are "alright".

In mechanical disks, the failures usually stem from the heads making contact with the platters or the motor failing. That said, the MTBF for a generic, desktop class hard drive is insane. It is very common, extremely common in fact, to find enterprise-class hard drives in use 15 years after manufacture. Given that I work for a network services company, we see many servers that are 5, 10 and even 15 years old that use the same magnetic media they have been for a long time. Do failures occur? You damn well be they do. Is a DVD or CD more reliable than a hard disk? Fuck no.

Optical media is less resistant to abuse than a HDD, easier to break and easier to render unusable / unreadable. No, hovering a magnet over a HDD will not ruin the data stored on the platters - a magnet strong enough to corrupt data will likely rip the drive out of your hands before it could do that.


Tapes are another story, but there is a very good reason that virtually every datacenter on the planet uses tapes as a backup medium, with NAS and SAN becoming more common as a replacement for them. Do you see 9GB DVDs being used instead of 10GB tapes? Do you imagine that a Blu-ray burner will replace DAT drives? It won't.

The highest shelf-life optical media is in the form of DVD-RAM. That is estimated to still reliably store your data 30 years from the time it was recorded - and guess what, DVD-RAM is in a bulky container, designed to protected the relatively fragile optical media within. From the outside, it resembles in form and function a bulky tape. And yet, nobody uses it.

In fact, comparing nearly any storage media to opticals always has the opticals on the losing end of a reliability debate. Even modern flash has an estimated shelf life higher than optical media.

Optical media is not reliable. It is cheap.

In the future, that may change. Don't count on it though, and don't fool yourself into thinking a DVD will outlast a hard drive "just because".


Edit: In addition, an argument can be made for written-once discs, which can arguably use much different dyes than consumer-grade rewriteables use. If I paid the same price per gigabyte for a DVD as I did a hard drive, I might expect (or demand) a longer shelf life. Given that I can pick up a DVD now for about 20 cents (working out to less than a nickel per gigabyte) I could never fathom trusting an off the shelf DVD to last longer than a mechanical disk.

[Joe Camacho]

Optical media is less resistant to abuse than a HDD, easier to break and easier to render unusable / unreadable. No, hovering a magnet over a HDD will not ruin the data stored on the platters - a magnet strong enough to corrupt data will likely rip the drive out of your hands before it could do that.

So that's just an urban legend? Interesting.

[funkyass]

Optical media is less resistant to abuse than a HDD, easier to break and easier to render unusable / unreadable. No, hovering a magnet over a HDD will not ruin the data stored on the platters - a magnet strong enough to corrupt data will likely rip the drive out of your hands before it could do that.

So that's just an urban legend? Interesting.

instantaneously, yes.

[Joe Camacho]

Optical media is less resistant to abuse than a HDD, easier to break and easier to render unusable / unreadable. No, hovering a magnet over a HDD will not ruin the data stored on the platters - a magnet strong enough to corrupt data will likely rip the drive out of your hands before it could do that.

So that's just an urban legend? Interesting.

instantaneously, yes.

Found this:
http://msn.pcworld.com/article/id,11657 ... ticle.html

I guess PC world is a good source.

[soulmata]

It is amazing the stupid things people will believe because one of their friends told it to them

[PHoNyMiKe]

I don't care what kind of barter soul spits about optical disks. it's a proven fact that sony blu-ray disks last over 45 years with 100.7% data retention.

p.s. I use a rev drive my daddy bought me for backups. it stores 35 billion bytes, and it's a little metal disk that spins real fast. it's really cool. so I have backups of the most important things in my life, such as porn and mp3s. I hope to one day be burried with my rev disk, and 100% of the data it retains. peace out!

[soulmata]

phonymike wishes he was as calm as me