When you consider storing data you need to consider the amount of data you can have on each type of media.
- Hard drives will hold anywhere from 160Gb to 2Tb of data at this time
- CDs hold up to 700Mb of data
- DVDs hold up to 4,7Gb of data, whereas DVD Dual Layer discs will hold up to 9,4Gb of data
The price range of hard drives has dropped considerably, and one hard drive holding 1Tb of data corresponds to 1462 CDs or 218 “normal” DVDs, corresponding to 110 DVD Dual Layer discs.
Advantages of CDs and DVDs
The advantage of burning to a CD or a DVD is that you can ship single discs to other people when you need a specific segment of data to be sent. If you sent the entire hard drive you would have lots of data at people’s disposal also, which could represent quite a security risk for yourself or your business.
The main disadvantage is, however, burning speeds. which for DVDs are generally up to 20Mb, whereas a hard drive running at 7200 rounds per minute will transfer data at speeds of up to approximately 60-65Mb per second.
Once you hit the disc full limit on a DVD you need to swap discs, whereas you can put lots more data on a hard drive.
Advantages of hard drives
The advantage of hard disc drives (in short: hard discs) is the overall transfer speed – and also the versatility with which you can transfer data. For external hard discs you have a USB cable which allows you to transfer data to all types of operating systems that can read the format you created for your hard disc. With DVDs the disadvantage is the fact that you have DVD+ and DVD- formats which are not always readable on all DVD readers. If you burnt your data on a DVD+ disc and your next computer only has a DVD- drive, you won’t be able to read your data.
Furthermore, you have the big disadvantage of DVDs being pretty frail when exposed to heat or humidity. In a non-operating mode hard discs are much less susceptible to data loss under the same conditions.
In Conclusion
When you need to store data you need a storage media that fits your data needs. You may have data that can fit a CD and in such cases you can burn single CDs or DVDs, but for most backup purposes you will find that getting an external hard disc will be the most economic option – and save you lots of time burning discs.
One last thing to remember is that only rewritable discs can be deleted and burned again whereas other discs can only be burned once. That is one extra advantage for the external hard drives.
Thanks for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed the information, and I would welcome your feedback if you were helped by this article or need any clarification. It would also be nice to know if you have questions that could give ideas for new articles on a similar subject.
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