Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Alas, those days are long gone. Plextor still sells competent optical drives, but
the optical drive market has changed dramatically. When Plextor sold $200+
DVD burners in competition with lesser brands that sold for a third of that,
there was room in the budget to build those drives to an extremely high stan-
dard. Nowadays, no one would buy a $200 DVD burner. Plextor now has to
compete with $25 units and price its drives at $40 or $50, so there's simply no
longer anything but mediocre DVD burners available.
Discs Matter
Although it's impossible to burn good
discs with a poor burner, it's very pos-
sible to burn poor discs with a good
burner. All you need to do is feed
low-quality blank discs to the good
burner, and you'll get rotten results.
We could write an entire topic (well,
at least an entire chapter) about disc
quality.
Fortunately, we don't have to write
all that, and you don't need to read
it. If you want top-quality burns,
use top-quality discs. The best discs
available are made by Taiyo-Yuden
(
http://www.t-yuden.com
). They cost
more than inferior discs, but they're
worth it if what you're burning to the
disc matters to you. If you can't get
TY discs, buy Verbatim (
http://www.
verbatim.com
)
discs.
For standard optical drives, we recommend
ASUS
(
http://usa.asus.com
),
Lite-
On
(
http://us.liteonit.com
)
, and
Samsung
(
http://www.samsung.com
)
. For Blu-
ray burners, we recommend
Pioneer
(
http://www.pioneerelectronics.com
).
BackupHardware
With typical desktop hard drives storing 1 TB or more, the thought of backing
up a computer can be pretty intimidating. Maintaining proper backups is not
quick, easy, or cheap. Nor is it optional, at least if you care at all about your
data. Because it's so much trouble to maintain proper backups, most people's
solution to protecting their data is simply to ignore the problem and hope
nothing bad ever happens. Inevitably, they're disappointed.
Like anything with moving parts, any hard drive will eventually fail. If you're
lucky, you'll get at least some warning when your hard drive is about to fail.
But don't count on that. All too often, hard drives fail like light bulbs—fine
one moment and dead the next. If all of your data is on that hard drive and
you have no backups, you might as well kiss your data goodbye. Yes, it's pos-
sible that some of your data may be recoverable, but—as many people have
learned to their regret—that recovery may come at a cost of hundreds or even
thousands of dollars.
Incidentally, although the practice
isn't as widespread as it was a few
years ago, TY discs are sometimes
counterfeited. You can avoid that risk
by buying from a reputable autho-
rized TY dealer. If you find spindles of
“Taiyo Yuden” discs on eBay selling at
a discount, it's a pretty safe bet that
they're fakes.
The only solution is to back up your system regularly and maintain multiple
copies of your data, including at least one off-site copy. Then, when the worst
happens, you'll have lost only the data you created or modified since your last
backup.
Developing and implementing a backup strategy is beyond the scope of this
topic, but whatever backup procedure you use will obviously require hard-
ware to make the copies. Disregarding tape drives, which are too expensive for
a home or small office system, there are several practical alternatives.
Opticaldiscs
A DVD+R disc stores about 4.4 GB, which for many people is sufficient for
routine backups, and requires only a few minutes to write and verify. The disc
costs only $0.25 or so and is small, light, and portable. Disc wallets that hold
from 16 to 100 or more discs are readily available, and you can carry the wallet
with you when you leave the house.
Obviously DVD+R isn't a workable solution for a full backup of a large hard
drive, which might require hundreds of discs, but it offers more than enough
capacity to store most people's primary working data, such as email, docu-
ments, digital photographs, and so on. We use DVD+R discs as a supplement,
writing all of our working data to one every Sunday.
