As you'll hear in the latest OSNews podcast (recorded yesterday, published later today), we had a discussion about Sony and some of its failed attempts at capturing mind share with proprietary technologies, among which the excellent but mismanaged MiniDisc technology. Imagine my surprise when I was browsing the web this morning, looking for news, and stumbled upon a supposedly new model of the Aspire One - with a Vmedia drive. A what?
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Member since:2008-07-15
Flash-based media is certainly more durable in day-to-day usage. What I meant, by shelf-life, was exactly that. If they are stored in a dark place, optical media will last longer than flash media over the long term, as the electrical charge that holds data persistent on the flash media eventually will bleed away if left inactive for a long period of time (note I'm talking about years, not months). Therefore, until we come up with something better, we will always need a way to read these optical disks and so moving parts in a computer will always be present in some form or another, for archival purposes if nothing else.
Member since:2006-01-04
Well that might be true in theory, but from my experience most of my really old CD-Rs are broken (10+ years). That is why I use HDs to archive stuff. As long as you fire them up fire them up from time to time you are fine.
In the long run moving parts will die, at least for home users ... but I also think dead tree books are on their way out so maybe take my word with a grain of salt.
Member since:
2006-01-04
I only use CD-RWs or DVD-RWs if I want to watch a movie at a friends place and he/she only has a DVD-player without SD card solt or USB.
Other than that I use hard drives for big stuff and SD cards for not so big stuff.
My 8 GB SD card has seen so much usage. No DVD-RW would have survived that.
CD/DVDs are just better diskettes, they scratch and break easily, they are big. Their packaging sucks.
SD cards and USB sticks are so much faster, easier to handle, need no special software, can have good file systems and are more robust.