Is Optical Media dead?

SirDice said:
You don't even need third party tools to do that. Format the stick, put a boot sector on it and copy the files from the CD/DVD to the stick and you're done.
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You need. At least in my case, first virtual optical drive (Daemontools Lite) to mount iso-file directly. Then little surprise, I had Vista 32-bit, and iso for for Win7 64-bit. If you write bootsector to stick with Vista's bootsect tool, it will not boot Win7 setup, and you cannot run bootsect tool from that Win7 iso-file with 32-bit Vista. Of course it would have been much easier to burn iso file to DVD, but I did not have blank DVD's on hand at that time. I don't remember which tool I used for making that stick work, probably Unetbootin.
 
Beastie said:
So when it comes to all optical media, I only have this to say: I hope they disappear as quickly as possible; and good riddance!!!
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Try to remember a few things:
1. I'm using RISC architecture that does not always have the ability to boot from a pen drive or any USB device.
2.I've gone from sleeping in the woods to sleeping in an old camper. If any money or work comes my way, I've the idea to spend it on better things.
3.Unlike the majority of you- make that 99% or greater, I'm one to look through what people have thrown away for replacement parts. I'm including older hardware that I've fixed for others.
4. Being in my situation is what most of you cannot understand. I'm homeless and still trying to work on projects while trying to stand on my own.
 
This sounds rather grim.

sossego said:
2.I've gone from sleeping in the woods to sleeping in an old camper. If any money or work comes my way, I've the idea to spend it on better things.
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Please state where you are located and what profession/skills you have.
If I got it right, you are in Florida?
Maybe someone could push something in your direction.

sossego said:
4. Being in my situation is what most of you cannot understand. I'm homeless and still trying to work on projects while trying to stand on my own.
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I salute you for this efford.
Understanding is approximately possible, even when lacking the first hand experience, from what I heard and was taught from parents and grandparents - those who served in two wars and came home only to rebuild homes and make do with whatever was available.
 
sossego said:
Try to remember a few things:
1. I'm using RISC architecture that does not always have the ability to boot from a pen drive or any USB device.
2.I've gone from sleeping in the woods to sleeping in an old camper. If any money or work comes my way, I've the idea to spend it on better things.
3.Unlike the majority of you- make that 99% or greater, I'm one to look through what people have thrown away for replacement parts. I'm including older hardware that I've fixed for others.
4. Being in my situation is what most of you cannot understand. I'm homeless and still trying to work on projects while trying to stand on my own.
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I'm sorry for your situation, but that has nothing to do with @Beastie's comment (it's almost trolling I'd say). Optical medium is old enough to be replaced. Why? It was stated already in this thread ..

If you want to stick to CD/DVD, you can. You'll find the workaround or boot from network (that's how I booted my N4000 (rp7400) back when I had to install HPUX on them).
 
If I wanted to troll, I would not be so personal- remember this statement before you make such a hasty reply.


It will be a long time before the entire world is able to use, afford, et al on computers that do not have optical media.

I am only one of billions who do not have the resources the rest of you have- keep this statement in mind.


We can now return this thread to its original purpose.
 
sossego said:
If I wanted to troll, I would not be so personal- remember this statement before you make such a hasty reply.


It will be a long time before the entire world is able to use, afford, et al on computers that do not have optical media.

I am only one of billions who do not have the resources the rest of you have- keep this statement in mind.


We can now return this thread to its original purpose.
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Your situation is an edge case and doesn't change the argument.

An abacus is also old and obsolete; it doesn't mean that anyone should be using one.

If you have a specific purpose for optical media, that's great. Meanwhile, almost everyone else has discarded it for the junk that it is.
 
Yup, it's dead.

I can buy an 8gb USB stick for 8 dollars. Which I can easily re-use.

All my software is downloaded. All my media is streamed/downloaded.

The only time i've used my DVD drive in recent history was to install some real old games in dosbox.
 
And the next technology to go to the museum will be magnetic storage on rotating disks, at least in my dream world :p
 
kpa said:
And the next technology to go to the museum will be magnetic storage on rotating disks, at least in my dream world :p
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I wish! It will take some time though for this to happen.
 
Is it even possible to buy a usb stick that is 100% guaranteed to be bootable. Some of the larger ones floating around seem to have chipsets in them that cant be read by a few bios.
Once the last one of them disappears will I be happy to accept usb bootable media.

The netboot stuff is great for servers and mass clients, but I find it a massive faff to do just for a single laptop.

My biggest worry is that CD/DVD's wont be replaced by anything else sane... instead perhaps we will require the "cloud" to install operating systems on our computer. And frankly that can fsck off!

I hope CDs and DVDs live on for many years to come because 100 CDs will always be cheaper than a memory stick.
 
Is a backup of all one's music CD/video DVD collection to SD cards or USB sticks the way to go ? Handling and labeling small media will waste more time than copying all to a large SATA disk, but they will be easier to play in any recent media player.
I like SD card write protect switch emulating read-only CD/DVD.
Anyways, good riddance of optical media (and motherboards not supporting USB boot) for i386/amd64 hardware !
 
Wow, a whole bunch of delusional people in this thread.

Blu-Ray discs are down to about 4 cents per gig. Have significantly better durability and longevity than CDs and DVDs. I have stacks of CDs and DVDs that date all the way back to the mid-1990s that all work perfectly except for one or two that I personally physically damaged.

With the insane failure rate hard drives have you would be a fool to use them as anything but temporary backup. If you want to run your own personal data center where you are copying your data to redundant drives and testing them constantly and swapping out drives as they die over time, knock yourself out.
 
When I had a 2 GB hard disk it only took about 3 CD-R's to back it up. That seemed pretty reasonable. And most computers at the time could read the backup.

Now I have a 2 TB hard disk and it would take around 80 BD-R's to back it up. That doesn't seem very reasonable. And there are plenty of computers that can't read BD-R's.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy, inexpensive alternative on the market at this time to backing up to hard disks.
 
With the insane failure rate hard drives
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I still have 2 80gig hard drives(Platium, and Maxtor, now Seagate. They still work fine after 10 years. Hard drives are cheap just get more if you worry about them failing. They work perfectly fine for storing personal data.
 
But you can't buy small hard drives. So either you waste a lot of space, or you put a lot of data on the drive, and it's all at risk. Backup DVDs are cheap, small, and can be spread around. Dual-layer or Blue-ray would be better, except the drives are less common and the media is more expensive. I want my backups to be readable on the lowest common denominator machine.
 
I still don't see any advantage to DVDs or BDs. They are not reliable; I've had many not work even when simply written to and then stored properly.

They are throwaways once the data on them is out of date, which it is shortly after, by definition.

If you are backing up more than the capacity of a single disc, you either need to buy a changer, or sit there and jockey them yourself. No thanks.

Optical media ensures that the data is on site, which means it is not protected in the case of fire or other similar bad luck.

I back up my data to other hard drives, and the important stuff is in "the cloud" in multiple places, tarred up and encrypted.
 
Having multiple copies is the important part. I've been happy enough with DVD reliability. Actually, I've been surprised at how even old, scratched disks still work. I do backup to more than one disk, by using multiple DVD drives at the same time.
 
In addition to a cheap way to back up ones data and store it off site, branches of the US government are now requiring data submission on electronic media. I am putting together an eCopy of a 510(K) application for the FDA. They will only accept CD, DVD or thumb drives with data that has been through their java based app (? filter for viruses and make all data read only). Once I get to the point of generating the iso with their app it will be interesting to mount it loop back and see the file ownership and permissions.
Also, their instruction do not say anything about returning thumb drives. Electronic submissions have yet to be implemented and the electronic media has to be accompanied by paper copies on submission. So if you have to work with the FDA and if you do not like donating thumb drives, optical media is not dead
 
Which method is cheaper to backup 750GB of data?

1) 160 DVDs
2) 1 external USB drive

Which method is safer to backup 750GB of data?

1) 160 DVDs
2) 1 external USB drive

Which method is easier to retrieve data from 750GB of data?

1) 160 DVDs
2) 1 external USB drive
 
gkontos said:
Which method is cheaper to backup 750GB of data?

1) 160 DVDs
2) 1 external USB drive
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Actually, I usually see a greater compression ratio. But okay, if we say 160 DVDs at $0.20 each, that's $80. About the same price as a (cheap) USB drive.

Which method is safer to backup 750GB of data?

1) 160 DVDs
2) 1 external USB drive
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Hard to say on that one. The USB drive has fragile platters, motors, and electronics. Without actual statistics, I don't know.

Which method is easier to retrieve data from 750GB of data?

1) 160 DVDs
2) 1 external USB drive
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The USB drive, sure.

Now... what if you don't have 750G of data to back up? What if you have varying amounts, say anywhere from 1G to 110G from various machines, and want to keep archival copies?
 
No. If even one out of 160 DVDs fails, the backup is gone. Chances this happens are considerably higher then the USB external drive failing.
 
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