Buyer's Guide 2024: External Storage And Backup

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Buyer's Guides

Organization And Storage Buyers Guide

Hard drives, CDs and DVDs provide reliable backup for your thousands of digital images

By Jon Sienkiewicz

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DVD Drives

DVD media is reliable, inexpensive and highly portable. The capacity of Double Layer (DL) media currently exceeds 8 GB (formatted), and higher densities are on the horizon. There’s still some debate about the long-term dependability of DVD (and CD) media, and storing image files only on DVDs could be considered a risky practice. But using a redundant set of DVDs in addition to hard drives adds an extra level of data protection. Plus, DVDs are a great way to organize and share sets of images. If you’re worried about disc decay, look into Delkin’s line of Archival Gold DVD-R media. Delkin claims a storage life of 100 years.

Sony’s DRU-820A DVD Multi Drive features DVD-RAM recording, which makes it one of the most versatile drives around. It writes Double Layer DVD+R media at 16x and DVD-RAM at 5x. It also burns CDs at a speedy 48x. The estimated street price is less than $100 and that includes the award-winning Nero 6.6 authoring software. A nice touch for owners of black PCs: it includes a black faceplate that can be used to replace the standard office-white equipment.

HP DVD 840i

Hewlett-Packard has the dvd840i, which writes to all types of blank media at speeds up to 16x. This HP is a favorite because it offers maximum available specifications, plus the LightScribe direct disc-labeling system. You can easily label your DVDs and CDs with graphics and text that are burned right into the disk surface. With an estimated street price of $99, it’s hard to beat. An external version (dvd840e) is also available.

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