Ban me.

And presented no evidence, just angry, sarcastic, hostile assertions. You’ve been extremely rude and unpleasant.

Please consider this post a warning. Sarcasm and hostility and irrationality aren’t overly welcome here. You’re welcome to post, but when you simply make hostile assertions with no reliance on facts, your posts become substantially less interesting to read.

I’m glad you use 2GB flash drives to back everything up. Given that I deal with a collective database/config management system that I locally replicate that’s nearing 1 TB in size, that would be rather expensive for me. (The local backup I had to do was more personal stuff, and merely ~200 GB in size. Mostly photo/video stuff, and some studio-grade multi-track recordings).

I’m guessing about 50 grand for a single backup. In contrast, I can back up the lot for under $100 via optical media, and about $500 via magnetic (HDD’s, which unfortunately also don’t qualify — see below). I only have to do so once a year (work takes care of the rest, offsite), but it still has to (painfully) be done.

Moreover, rewriteable media such as flash drives and DVD-RAM’s doesn’t qualify as a ‘frozen in amber’ backup. Or did you not bother reading what I’d written before you decided to start your posts?

Leaving that DVD-RAM’s an interesting format, but it’s never really caught on and the media costs a great deal,($4-$5/10GB was the cheapesd`I found; by contrast good DVD+R’s run around $0.60/10GB), it seems an incredibly unwise choice for my purposes.

It’s important that what I write be readable in 5 years. Given dye tests, and surface tests, I’ve reasonable confidence the Sony stuff will be OK. (Checking with our IT people today, it’s fine at 3 years, with zero failures over about 20,000 disks for our company, though over half of those were Pioneer; the balance Sony and TDK).

Given the number of DVD-RAM drives we’ve got (0), and that our suppliers and customers have (approx 0), this is easier said than done.

If you’ve monitored tens of thousands of disks, good for you. We have, and I’ve talked to the people monitoring them.

Your cavalier dismissal of bitsetting (and not even mentioning overburn) is amusing.

Sure, I can buy a Plextor that reads DVD-RAM’s (for all I know mine does). But I’ve no interest or use in doing so.

TO make it clearer: we have very different applications.

You clearly are a lot more wealthy than I am, and willing to pay $50,000 per semi-full backup. I’m not.

You clearly are willing to have backups that wouldn’t pass basic corporate IT audits. I can’t afford that luxury.

You clearly live in an environment that has extremely high confidence that DVD-RAM will be a cheaply-available ubiquitous media in the future. I, unfortunately, live where this does not seem likely to be the case.

You are welcome to the view that LG is superior to Plextor. If it gives you some special pleasure to think so; great. Overall, it’s not a rational view, nor is it backed up by many in the IT industry.

As DVD burners (and readers) for all common DVD formats, LG is inferior in optics and physics.

Certainly, in reading DVD-RAM’s (maybe writing them) it is superior. It’s superior in LightScribe.

But for many, that’s like saying your Sony Betamax is superior to a good DVD burner because the Sony can read and write Betamax tapes.

True, but rather irrelevant.

Try and tone down the language a bit and use fewer hot-button words.
-wolfe

Thankfully I’ve got more gigs than a sane man knows what to do with.

I meant TDK and Sony blanks, sometimes Verbatim. CDs. Depends what I need the blanks for and how much I’ve got on me. Why would you say the ‘infamous Maxell’ has Sony as the only alternative? Perhaps Wal-mart is the Evil Empire after all?

Also, the benign switch from firmware 105 to 106, for example, can mean all the difference in the world. Otherwise you might end up blaming a perfectly good drive or blanks for something entirely not their fault. And spending good money too, while you’re at it. And although it might be true that some driver versions may solve old bugs whilst introducing unbeknownst new ones I’ve never had it happen to me or even heard of specific cases. Even much less so with ROM upflashes. If upgrades are done properly there should be no problem. Perhaps the old drivers persisted and caused a conflict? Or some buggy software. InCD is notorious for that.

If I were to find myself NEEDING to write to DvD media anyway I would most certainly go the extra mile and use DVD-RAM DS 9.4 GB (I can burn those, provided they’re ‘removable’)and do a proper job. As usual, TDK, Verbatim or Sony branded blanks. Preferably TDK. ESPECIALLY DvD-RAM if I were in your position (not before getting rid of the Plextor and getting my little self the top range LG drive available along with the required blanks; they’re far more than safe buys - dare I say they’re excellent) where I’d need to backup company critical data.

You will know you’ve tried the best, whether what you’re looking for is reliability, speed or quality. The blank’s higher cost is well worth it. The only reason why Plextor doesn’t know what to do with itself when we’re talking DvD-RAM is cause they hate the guts out of RAMPRG members. >:]

Really, forget your prejudice and give DvD-RAM and afferent drives a try. At least for professional use. DvD-RAM is excellent media for backup, if nothing else. You’ll never look back.

Cheers.

@Sony As for firewood, I’d be interested to know what you actually use for DVD+R’s then.

Both TDK and Sony are near the top of any list I’ve seen (and that backs my experience). Check out this site for example:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

As for the LG drives, in general they’re safe buys. I’m not familiar with your model, but I remember looking at the line in general and concluding I’d no interest in DVD-RAM support, no interest in LightScribe, and the line here lacked support for bit-setting and overburn on CD’s, which I consider to be quite important features, personally. Obviously, others would differ.

With little question, the flagship (not OEM) Plextors tend to be amongst the very best. (The Plextor’s OEM’d from BenQ are, well, kind of mediocre. Almost certainly inferior to your LG).

But Plextor’s background in ‘constant use’ professional optical drives, their excellent tool suite, their good optics and research have tended to make them a technological leader. Their build quality has also tended to be excellent.

I find your strategy on firmware (’updated to the latest’) interesting. Mine differs. I used to do as you do, and, for security reasons, I do bite the bullet and immediately install security-related windows updates. Otherwise, I prefer to maintain any good working configuration as-is.

Some years of experience watching firmware release procedures (and driver release procedures) have convinced me that few companies do competent regression testing.

This means any firmware/driver upgrade is pretty much a pig-in-a-poke. That said, if one has a specific problem (as I did), then one obviously upgrades. But having had upgraded hardware fail (and require a downgrade) a few times, and having observed release procedures, I’m a little more wary these days.

Cheers,
-wolfe

** Please play nice. Consider this my living room. Different ruleset from mabtw.com. She’s welcome to post here. If she says something you think is stupid, call her on that, politely, but no sarcasm, no criticism directed at an individual. -wolfe

The latest firmware, of course. Just like the bios, videobios, all the drivers and the .net fwork. Of the 8 partitions on 3 drives there’s one on its own drive specially designated for all such critical files and their respective installation kits as well as a one of the 3 fixed size paging files totalling 5120MB. This is the same partition that’s used for record storage (including my http server’s root folder) and temporary data including the drive’s burn buffer as well as backups of the OS partition and critical data pending any potential need for restoration. Installation kits for all other software packages are decentralised under the form of “InstKit” subfolders containing each software’s respective installation kit and an url to the homesite.