Need new removable storage drive: DVD or Tape?

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Originally Posted by DownBeachBreeze

If your not happy with you vidio card look up the "GFORCE FX5600XT 128MB TV 8XAGP REM CTRL VIVO DVI". It scored best with "Toms Hardware Guide" online and cost less that $100".

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I hope this is a joke, I will NEVER, EVER EVER EVER get an nVidia product again, they are LOADED with SERIOUS bugs that cause system crashes, blue screens, prevent the PC from booting up, and then if your computer actually works after installing the nCrapia product, the product itself won't work properly if at all. Then they'll release driver updates you'll always think will solve the problems but they always make them worst, I know, I've hoped their last 5 updates would make it better, I kept thinking, I know the last one made it worst, but they've got to have got it right this time, but even after the 5th update they released the problems just kept getting wrost, now when there's a new update, I wont even consider it for a second, I've learnt my lesson: nVidia driver updates = new added bugs to make your computer as unstable as possible.

Not to mention the ATI cards are MUCH faster and more powerfull than even the best (or least worst) nCrapia. It's plain impossible that that card would have won the best score unless that was a few years ago, because that's not a fraction of what today's cards can do.

Plus anyway I need a card with a TV tuner because as I said my PC is my TV and VCR, and ATI also rules for TV tuners.

I'm also pretty sure jsut upgrading my CPU and sound chip will be enough to make those videos play properly, even though my video card is over 3 years old, it still does everything I need and my only replacement option would be at least $400 US for a good card with a tv tuner.

The 30,000 re writes (or at least uses, I assume they mean re-writes) is from:
http://www.storagebysony.com/reselle..._xref_ait1.pdf

CHTSdotcom,.. have you considered using a "VCR" (video cassette recorder) to archive your tv shows? It is a tape, compressed, inexpensive and fast all rolled into one. :eek:

Yea I used that before I got my ATI card, it is a real nightmare, have you ever tried finding a TV show on one of 50 tapes? It can literally take days or weeks of playing each back until you find it. Not to mention they use A TON OF SPACE, those old black boxes (tapes) are huge, the quality is terrible, only 2 hours per tape on a barely acceptable quality, and just a total pain to use.

I dont know if you still use these antiques for recording but if you try an ATI all in wonder card you will NEVER return to those big low quality low capacity tapes.

What used to take days or weeks to find a specific show is now instant by simply typing the name of scrolling through my list of recordings, and then instantly starts playing, no more FF'ing or REW'ing forever.

Not to mention to record a show i simply use the up/down/left/right on the ATI remote to navigate through channels (up/down) and times/dates (left/right), once I find what I want to record I press Record once for record the show, twice to record daily, 3 times for weekly, 4 times for every sunday (where sunday is the current day), 5 times to delete the recording, I can also do the same with the play button to automatically start the TV but without recording.

Wow, I just noticed you used "fast" to qualify tapes, what's fast about them? How fast the quality degrades? Or how fast they piss you off so much you never want to use a VCR again?

Anyway, I'm sorry if you're still living with such hard to use and poorly designed recording devices (of course one or two decade ago it was the only choice or almost), but since at least 7 years there have been good recording solutions for PCs and there are now stand alone ones that use a built in and/or removable hard drive.

My friend had recently asked me to record a TV show on those old black tapes, it literally took me 15 minutes to figure out howmy VCR worked, I hadnt touched it in 7-8 years (when I got my first ATI tuner card), and when I finally got it working, I was discusted by the absolutely unwatchable quality of the recording comapred to what I record on my PC (I must say this was on the lowest quality, EP SP or whatever they call those things), but it was really a terrible quality, but this might also be due to the fact my VCR has been collecting dust for the past 8 years, it makes a great monitor stand, which is hinestly the only reason I keep it, if my monitor had came with a stand the VCR would be in the trash where it belongs.

Oh, and the ATI card with my tape drive allows me to store 70 hours of VERY high qualtiy video on a tape that is 10 times smaller than a video tape, this means I can store 700 hours of better than a tape's best quality in the same storage space a video tape could only hold 2 hours of not even comparable quality video, that's 350 times less storage space required per hour of video!

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Originally Posted by ClickHere2Surf.com

I hope this is a joke, I will NEVER, EVER EVER EVER get an nVidia product again, they are LOADED with SERIOUS bugs that cause system crashes, blue screens, prevent the PC from booting up, and then if your computer actually works after installing the nCrapia product, the product itself won't work properly if at all. .

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You can test each vidio card yourself or you can rely on some organization which has already done the testing for you. Just because a vidio card was produced that did not perform to your specs does it mean that all the products produced after are not worthy of consideration. It's not a joke. Your letting your emotions interfere with your logic. I went from an AGP card to an 8x AGP card, a new Asus 865p MB 800 fsb, 2.4 ghz Hyperthreading Processor 400 fsb. This match of MB FSB and Processor FSB is the perfect pipeline of a data channel. They have finally solved the data bottleneck problem. These compontents were reviewed before I bought them. However, I also bought bad products which recieved favorable review. The RDRAM would overheat on my previous Micron MB and burned circuits. It was highly rated.
The tape drive was not rated. The Onstream D130 ADR tape drive had bad hardware but the replacement under warranty was fixed. I believed that the ramdom file access and the tape capacity was the asset which could not be duplicated under traditional tape drives and I also believed that DVD/RW drives would have a problem with rewrites and speed. No data was produced on these products so I would not risk a buy and findout option. I bought a laser printer that recieved reviews from "Toms Hardware Guide" for less than $200 by Samsung to replace my HP laser which finally fell apart after 8 years.
As a matter of fact I found this website a couple of weeks ago looking for a product, "USB to DB15" convertor, in a search the person, "drivers", was having the same problem I was having last May. I'm having problems making it work now. However, I did not spend a lot of money on it and I have will start a search for solutions as I am probably not the first one since there are many others who have bought the product.
However, "Tom's Hardware Guide" did produce an article this year that showed that the circuit boards that they tested were not the same as boards for sale to the general public. In mass production the boards were shown to have less circuits that ones sent for review. The article showed that as long as the board still stayed within a couple of percentage points of performance then it was an acceptable production alternation. This is the trouble with cutting edge technology and cooking the production line to make profits in a capitalistic socitey.

DownBeachBreeze

Firstly nVidia has caused me hours of trouble, and rendered my PC unbootable, I absolutely will never buy anything again from them because of this, but not only that, only ATI makes video cards with the features I need, so I couldnt get an nvidia one even if I wanted too.

And by the way, the bottleneck in ANY system, is the hard drive, no upgrade whatsoever will provide a performance increase as big as getting a good hard drive setup, you could have a Pentium 200 mhz running miles faster than a 3.6 ghz if it has a faster hard drive.

That's why I got an SATA RAID 0, and had an IDE RAID 0 before, no other upgrade provided an as big difference, in fact, when I upgraded my cpu, and doubled my ram, I didnt notice a change AT ALL.

Also, why bother with laser printers? Inkjet costs less for the printer, then less for the ink, and prints WAY faster than a laser pritner in the same price range. No to mention the quality is normally 8 times better on inkjet, and miles better on a photo quality inkjet, not to mention all inkjets print in color.

I've done a LOT of reasearch to findthe best printer for my high volume printing, and laser had disadvantages in EVERY aspect (printer cost, toner cost, print speed, print quality), the one and only advantage laser has is water proof prints, which I don't need.

I ended up getting an HP business inkjet 100, it prints 23 pages per minute and 20 in color, thats 3 seconds for a full color page, whereas the color laser printers at 5 times the cost took over 1 minute per color graphics page, and not to mention the output quality is absolutely terrible compared to an inkjet print, and toner cost is double that of ink cost per page.

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Originally Posted by ClickHere2Surf.com

The 30,000 re writes (or at least uses, I assume they mean re-writes) is from:
http://www.storagebysony.com/reselle..._xref_ait1.pdf

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Ah .. so it means 30,000 indivual write operations per tape (think like as in every time the Ide light flashes) not uses ;)

Huh? The IDE light probably flasghes over 30 000 times in a single backup, what do you mean?

Also, my uncle asked me if the tapes can be used more than once, I told him my older tapes got daily backlups for 5 years and still worked great, he said the tapes were he works could only be used once, is there really a tape that only lasts 1 use?

I am aware of WORM tapes (write once read many), could this be what he was talking about? If so then the tape is made to allow only one use no matter how many it could survive.

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Originally Posted by ClickHere2Surf.com

Huh? The IDE light probably flasghes over 30 000 times in a single backup, what do you mean?.

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I mean everytime the heads engage to write on the tape - btw the ide light flashes on any activity (read /write/ query cahe, refresh, all sorts of stuff) - thats what they mean - on a tape its serial, but each file is still a write in 'optimum conditions' (as in some files will be many writes) for tape it might be say 10 ? (takes a flying guess ) different serially written operations per file/job which means only 3,000 'uses' then .. less anyway ;)

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Originally Posted by ClickHere2Surf.com

..Also, my uncle asked me if the tapes can be used more than once, I told him my older tapes got daily backlups for 5 years and still worked great, he said the tapes were he works could only be used once, is there really a tape that only lasts 1 use?.

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Policy probably at work ? (you don't want your 'enterprise level'(means a big fat company with extra critcal stuff etc) main backup d/b put on some two year old tape thats been used a 1000 times already! you use new tapes for that & several copies which as you are 'enterprise class' you keep at least one of forever unused, incase you have to rollback your systems to that point for some reason - loads of folks have facilities to hold all their data like this -every bank I've ever worked at has loads of 'one only unique master historical tapes') & I've never heard of 'worm tapes' as that's usually a term used to apply to cd/dvd write once as opposed to re-writeable .. tape is only 'not rewriteable' if you choose to make it so ..

About the 1 use tapes, that makes sense, he worked for a company that makes passenger jets. And I saw WORM tapes from sony, they just have a code, either key holes on the bottom, but I doubt that since it could very easily be modified, probably either something on the memory chip (these sony tapes store the directory in a memory chip embedded on the tape so there's no rewinding all the time to read/update it), otherwise it mus be a signal on the tape itself.

They are most likely made for situations like you described.

About the 30 000 uses, I'm still not sure I understand, this drive uses helical scan (a drum spinning extremely fast, like in a VCR but much faster), as soon as there's activity, you can hear the drive pull the tape out of the cartridge, wrap it around the drum, and then hear the drum start (it spins at 6,400 RPM), it then only stops the drum and puts the tape back in the cartridge after a few seconds of inactivity.

Well, as I was looking for the drum RPM on the sony website, I came accross this:
"High reliability with MTBF of 300,000 POH (100% duty cycle), head life of 50,000 hours, and media uses of 30,000 end-to-end passes"