I was looking at my 16GB USB flash drive today, and thinking about how it holds almost 4 times what a DVD +R disk holds. Then I thought about how it can be erased and rewritten any number of times, and how it didn't require me to buy a separate drive to use it.
If I wanted to buy a DVD burner, I'd pay something like $38-$40 to be able to archive 16 GB onto 4 disks. It would take a long time, and there would always be the possibility of getting scratches on the disks, making them unreadable.
I got my 16 GB flash drive for about $30. Prices for this size have been relatively stable of late, but that is partly due to the weakness of the dollar relative to other currencies. (making imports more expensive) It is only a matter of time before we see 32 GB flash drives for the same price. With USB 3 motherboards now on the market, the flash drives will hopefully be even faster than before.
I see that Blu-Ray disk burner drives are also dropping in price. However, the media for this drive is going for about $3 a disk. Plus, it still suffers from the possibility of the disks getting scratched, and losing all the data. Each disk holds about the same as my 16 GB flash drive.
I've noticed that some places are even shipping games and such already on USB flash drives. Others are just being downloaded directly these days. It all makes me wonder if the age of optical media is already slipping behind us.
What about you - are you going to spend $$ on a new optical drive, or just thinking of getting a bigger USB flash drive when prices come down (or storage goes up)??
Optical drives aren't going anywhere for a long time. Comparing optical media to flash memory really isn't a fair comparison, as optical disks are typically more of an archival tool. Even with prices on thumb drives dropping, DVD's are still a fraction of the price of a flash drive. No one is going to buy a dozen drives at $30 a pop to back stuff up. If that's the case, they would go with magnetic media, which is again a fraction of the cast of flash. Flash memory also suffers from degredation issues and wears out with repeated rewrites, which may or may not be an issue depending on the application.
jolma
Senior Member
posted: Oct. 31, 2009 @ 10:41a
I don't use DVD anymore for backup, hard drives are too large compared to DVDs and are cheap enough to buy for backups. But I still use my DVD burner. When driving a car, I don't see any good way to operate an MP3 player. My car cd changer has easy to control buttons on the radio- so I need to burn CDs for it.
For movie delivery, I think DVD will be around a long long time. My internet provider has a limit that wouldn't allow me to get movies online. Like most people I have several DVD players, but I would have to buy a lot of new hardware to play USB or something stored on my computer all over the house.
On the other hand, the market share of games that are sold over Steam keeps increasing. And while people may watch several movies a month, game purchases are rare enough to fit better into internet provider limits. I wouldn't be surprised if PC games stopped being sold as physical media. Also, when you sell games on DVD, people often trade them in to the used market which game publishers don't like.
>If that's the case, they would go with magnetic media, which is again a fraction of the cast of flash. Flash memory also suffers from
Good point - and that's probably why I recently purchased a 500 GB hard drive and external enclosure to back up the things I think are important.
>When driving a car, I don't see any good way to operate an MP3 player. My car cd changer has easy to control buttons on the radio- so I need
Ah - a lot of the newer HD Radios have USB ports on them - you can simply transfer your songs to USB flash drive, and play them on your car stereo.
>I wouldn't be surprised if PC games stopped being sold as physical media. Also, when you sell games on DVD, people often trade them in to >the used market which game publishers don't like.
Hmm - hadn't thought of that. I LIKE buying cheap games at yard sales and thrift stores. Since I'm still using dialup (200 hours for $4.95 a month), downloading any game that isn't small is not appealing. However, the idea of losing my ability to resell games, or buy the many cheap games that others resell, really bothers me.
I was just talking with someone the other day about the DVD form factor. We both agreed that the DVD is a good physical size and logical size for a lot of applications. You can still fit a ton of DVD's neatly inside a binder, and the storage space on a DVD is pretty good for storing things like audio, video, software, etc. I find it actually convenient to have one product on one disk. It's easy to pull it out, use it, and put it back. Any smaller, and the disks would be easy to loose. I love SD cards for convenience, but can't remember how many I've lost. Same with thumb drives. Thank God for encryption, becuase I've misplaced several of them. DVD's just seem convient to store and use for me.
I agree that needing a physical drive is a limitation, but one that's livable with. It's nice to have the smaller USB port on things like a car stereo, media players, etc., but for computers the optical drive is so common it doesn't matter much.
I was using DVDs for a long time for an offsite backup of my musical collection. There were simply too many to make for a simple restore process. So, I bought a 5400 rpm hard drive off Newegg and now backup everything there and send it to another location every few months.
While I think DVD is on the way out, I don't think flash is going to take its place. Think of the future:
Movies/TV shows - Eventually we will be able to stream almost any episode of any TV show or any movie directly to our TVs computers. There won't be a need for millions of people to have there "personal" copies of this kind of data. It can all be served up from providers.
Music - Again, why would we need physical media for this? Already, it's easy enough to download music to portable devices. You can stream songs that you don't have stored locally on a hard drive.
Software - You will download software and install it to your SSD. No need to ship or go out and purchase optical media.
Backups - Unless you have a small amount of data, optical media is a pretty inefficient way to back it up. Backups will be performed to hard drives or to an internet backup service. Personally, I want to be personally responsible for my data, so I'll take it to a separate location of my choosing. I don't want to blame a "cloud" somewhere for losing my data if something happens.
I can still see using optical media or thumb drives for OS image restores, though I suppose these could be stored in a data center as well. I mean with Linux being installed on motherboard chips now, you will never really be without an OS or way to access the internet.
Optical media isn't going anywhere anytime soon...just look at some US numbers:
57% of US Homes Have Access to High-Speed Internet -- that means 43% of homes don't even have access to high speed internet and downloading is not a viable option.
According to Nielsen’s National TV panel, around 80.6% homes in US possess a computer in their home. -- That is nearly 20% of homes without a PC...however, I bet most of those have a DVD player, if not at least a CD player...how do you reach these 20% without a computer, much less access...do you just leave those sales on the table?
>Movies/TV shows - Eventually we will be able to stream almost any episode of any TV show or any movie directly to our TVs computers. There >won't be a need for millions of people to have there "personal" copies of this kind of data. It can all be served up from providers.
So everybody just has to be shelling out $25+ a month to have access to this? Not me.
The main reason I have a DVD drive in my PC right now is so that people can bring over a DVD from the library, and we can all watch it for free. How do you do that if everything is streaming? I realize that the DVD could be replaced with a flash drive (heck, I compress a typical DVD movie down to roughly 500 Megabytes on my flash drive) - but streaming gives the provider too much control over the use, and takes the control away from the user. Plus, it forces you to have yet another recurring fee in your life - giant sucking sound from your wallet.
jayK
Senior Member - JayK
posted: Nov. 2, 2009 @ 12:09p
IStillPickUpPennies said: The main reason I have a DVD drive in my PC right now is so that people can bring over a DVD from the library, and we can all watch it for free. How do you do that if everything is streaming?It's only a matter of time before libraries start building streaming video-on-demand applications that are freely accessible from home by library patrons, with DRM to encourage movie companies to participate. This infrastructure is already appearing with eBooks: http://www.mymediamall.net/
I've tried renting DVDs from my local library, but they are almost always scratched and have playback problems. Another option for those without fast internet access is providing the ability to download movies onto a reusable DRM-enabled flash drive you can buy for a nominal fee, like this: http://www.devicepedia.com/news/rent-movies-on-flash-memory-cards.html
There are plenty of free, ad-supported video streaming sites such as Hulu. Streaming video does not always mean paying a monthly fee.
Disclaimer: By providing links to other sites, FatWallet.com does not guarantee, approve or endorse the information or products available at these sites, nor does a link indicate any association with or endorsement by the linked site to FatWallet.com.
Members of our community may attach files to a post in accordance with the User Agreement. FatWallet is not responsible for the content, accuracy, completeness or validity of any information contained in any attached file. Files have *not* been scanned for viruses. Be especially wary of Excel files which may contain malicious content.
