Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Sony DRU-500A DVD+RW/-RW Drive

Whee! They finally have it in stock! This drive is one of the nicer ones out there at the moment, capable of reading and writing all (4) of the current DVD formats (DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW), and it doesn't cost that much more then one of the DVD recordable drives that only does a single format.

DRU-500A DVD+RW/-RW Drive

I picked up some DVD-R media for about $4 per DVD. While not as inexpensive as CD-R for storing archival data, it makes up for it by reducing the sheer number of CDs that need to be kept track of. I expect that I'll be able to fit 6 (700Mb) or 7 (650Mb) CDs worth of data on a single DVD-R (4.7Gb) platter, which means that instead of keeping track of say, 100 CDs, now I'm only keeping track of 14-16 DVDs. I suspect I'll be engaging in large-scale reduction in my archived data collection within the next 30 days (my 48 CD storage case for personal data alone is just about full). Not to mention using the medium for backups of all of my CDs that I've ripped to MP3 (I hate the audio-CD format, it's a pain keeping track of the 100 or so CDs that I own).

Gads, it's crazy enough now that a 700Mb CD can hold over 11 hours of CD-quality music (128kbps is about 1 minute per Mb of storage). Those 4.7Gb platters are going to be able to hold about 75-80 hours of music! (There's only 168 hours in a week...) Only downside is that the MP3 player in my car won't read DVD (although having MP3 CDs is nice enough).

posted by Wuphon's at 9:58 PM