PHOTO 101: DVDs & Hard Drives

Remember the days of Zip drives? Or, better yet, SyQuest drives??? If you don't remember these, they were the predecessors to the DVD. I still have stacks of Zip drives somewhere in my garage. I now have spindle upon spindle and book upon book of DVDs. While fairly inexpensive they are not infallible. If you want to archive your files without fear of your archives being corrupt and unreadable in a few years, you might consider investing in the slightly more expensive, yet more time efficient and reliable hard drive. DVDs typically will run you 20 to 50 cents each for 4.7 gigabytes of space. I have several hard drives in my studio ranging from 640 gigs to 1 terabyte. The terabyte ran me $200 at Best Buy however, I just went to Costco for the regular shopping excursion and found 1 teras (same product) for $179 (18 cents per gig). The even better deal was a 640 gig for $95 which works out to about 15 cents per gig. Consider this: a DVD at it's cheapest is 5 cents per gig and takes more time and space than a My Book Western Digital hard drive. I can "burn" 30 gigs of image files in about 25 minutes without operator assistance where that would take 7 DVDs, about an hour of time depending on your write speed and the issue of my needing to babysit the DVD burner, loading, unloading, writing on the DVD, inserting a new one, starting over for currupt DVDs that wouldn't burn correctly. You have all experienced this. Isn't our time more valuable? I know mine is, especially with a baby who is at the cusp of walking, YIKES! So get over to Costco (they don't have the $95 640 gig or the $180 1000 gig online.) Tip: all hard drives are not created equally. From my research I have found Western Digital to be of the most reliable on the market.