[citation][nom]niknikktm[/nom]Optical discs take up much less shelf space than a HDD would.Say what? Put it on a shelf? An optical disc will outlast a hundred HDD's, and who puts a HDD on a shelf? HDD's fail. Moving parts wear out. It's a fact. If you take care of an optical disc it will last a lifetime.I've had no problems with QC of the media I buy. Just don't buy the bargain basement brands. I use Ritek and maybe have one defective disc in a 50 disc spindle.I've been burning DVD's for over a decade. Never had one of my discs go bad yet. Wanna know how many hard drives I've gone through???[/citation]
The thing is you probably don't write that many dvds. If you've written enough dvds since the've become affordable to buy (around 2003) you will find that many which have been written in the past 6 years could have read errors (particularly on COMPRESSED DATA BACKUPS). Way back when we had slower burners & higher quality substrate things were good and the lifespan was advertised as "lifetime", but in recent years-- there have been projected "aging" lab tests which show that an ordinary DVD-R/+R disc can have corrupt data (un-recoverable) in as little as 2 years. Now, compare that with a hard drive that sits on a shelf for 5 years and you see where what I'm getting at-- provided you don't have high humidity or large temperature changes.. chances are that drive will be able to work nearly as factory fresh. There are practical reasons to understand about the longevity of data storage devices & media.. because alot of these media backups//digital conversion have lost PRICELESS conversions of film & historical documentation. To say that off the shelf optical discs are archive quality (aside from Taiyo Yuden) is a critial mistake. Manufactured Media (printed dvd discs) used to have a longer lifespan due to high quality substrate, but that's almost no longer the case anymore-- but since the industry is converting over to blue ray, the focus is on high quality blue ray substrate.