M-A's

technology blog

Friday 12 June 2009

Archival price

I was considering buying a 50pk 4.5gig DVD spindle. It's ~15.40$ CAD for a good archival quality.
On the other side, a 1.5TB HD is 150$.

15.50$ / (50*4.5gb) = 6.9¢
150$ / 1500gb = 10¢

Taking in account that there's always lost space in DVD due to trying to fit it to its maximum space, the amount of time taken to format the data to fit in a DVD, the manual intervention of swaping the disks and the slow DVD write speed (compared to a SATA2 HD), I think it's not valuable to archive on DVD anymore, assuming you keep 2 copies of your data.

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