optical discs vs usb keys

A

ar09

Gawd
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Feb 23, 2009
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something just occured to me, if usb keys are faster and have a lot more space capacity. why do we still use optical discs? (like cds,dvds,blu-ray discs) usb keys are a lot better!
 
Price? a 4gig dvd is like $.30 while a 4gig flash drive is around $10. I can burn quite a bit of dvd's and cd's for the price of one usb stick.
 
I would also feel alot better having my data on a properly stored quality DVD+R than on a cheap USB stick. Also you can write 4GB to a DVD alot quicker than you can get it onto a cheap USB stick, 16X DVD is like 20MB a second, and I haven't seen a USB stick go that fast. If there was one I wouldn't expect it to be cheap. 6 or 7 cents a GB is pretty hard to beat too.

Dustin
 
You still need optical media for distribution and sharing stuff. I don't want to buy and give out USB drives for everything lol.
 
I buy 100 packs of TDK DVR+R at Fry's when they go on sale for $14.99 so that's $.15 each; cheapest 4GB USB stick I've ever seen - and this is just 1 stick, mind you - was $6.99 at Fry's one time.

While USB sticks are quite useful, optical media will still be with us for a very long time to come, and continue to increase in capacity up to a certain point while prices will continue to come down.
 
$.15 per disc is very nice, but after the 100th write to that $15 usb stick, its paid for itself...so theres pros and cons to both, hence why theyre both still around. Personally I find now that USB drives have gotten so cheap I prefer them over other types of media. Plus I have kids, so any sort of CD,DVD, game, etc has a fairly easy shot at getting scratched. (Living in Florida with all the sand and having Pergo floors just makes it even worse)
 
Those are 2 different jobs though. Long term archival versus data transfer. If you need to move a small to medium amount of data from one location to another I guess the USB key isn't a bad way to go. If I need to give a few GB of info to someone else, the DVD route is better because I don't need to get my USB stick back later on, and they have a permanent copy that only cost me a few cents to make. If it's just a few MB, then email works much better, not requiring me to physically interact with the intended recipient at all. The last thing I used a USB stick for was to put network drivers on my buddies netbook. They're handy at times, but for bulk transfer of GBs of information, they're just too bloody slow for my likes. The DVD will do 4GB alot quicker, and for more than 4GB, an external HDD is a pretty viable option these days too. The $ per GB on a 500GB or 1TB external is way better than USB drives, and will be several times faster. I think the best thing I can say about USB sticks is their durability, no moving parts, no exposed recording surfaces. That has value for sure.

Dustin
 
is it only because of looks, that people like cds.

usb keys are the future maybe.

cds are too fragile.
 
ar09 said:
is it only because of looks, that people like cds.

usb keys are the future maybe.

cds are too fragile.
Click to expand...

Let's see how you feel when suddenly your USB stick fails to initialize because one or two memory cells crap out, which happens far more often than people realize. It's when the one or two memory cells happen to be in the area where the initialization info is housed that it becomes a big issue.

Brand names don't matter since the Flash-RAM probably comes from Samsung anyway, they make 10x more than the next competitor.

But I've had entirely too many USB sticks crap out and die on me, some that I only used 2 times - I wrote data to them, and changed it, afterwards they didn't even get recognized when plugged in (Kingston sticks, not that it matters).

They can and do crap out just as easily as anything else. As long as I get a solid verified burn on a DVD+R, I'm good for years given I don't scratch the damned things up. :)
 
hey not all usb keys fail. if flash memory was like that, we wouldn't be using ssds.
 
Only that: cheap DVDs use organic dyes as the optical substrate. So they actually decompose over time like any other organic matter.


Archival grade DVDs are typically $100 for 25 of them.
 
SSDs generally have more "brains" on them than a USB stick. An SSD can track how many times a cell has been written, and use wear levelling and such to balance it out. They can also detect if a particular cell fails to write, and reallocate the data on it to another cell. USB sticks are much simpler in their operation, at least the cheap ones are. The more expensive ones do have some SSD-like features (like using multiple channels to increase speed), but if you're using these your cost per GB goes through the roof making comparison with optical media even more difficult. USB sticks fail for any number of reasons, there's a USB interface to worry about for instance. Part of what makes optical discs a somewhat reliable medium is the fact that the actual data carrier itself (the DVD) is separated from the electronic and mechanical systems needed to read from and write to it. There's very little to fail when it comes time to get your data back, provided that you have stored the media correctly. A USB stick has plenty of fail points, and if it doesn't initialize when you plug it in, you either lose the data or spend lots of money to (maybe) get it back with a recovery service. It's also rewritable, so even malicious software (or human error) could wipe the data off by accident. Once a DVD+R is written, no virus or idiocy can erase it without physically destroying the disc. I just don't see alot of overlap between applications for these two mediums.

Dustin
 
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