

The DVD is dead. USB flash drive restores are here. - budmang
http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/01/25/the-dvd-is-dead-usb-flash-drive-restores-are-here/

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dangrossman
Tangentially related: I really wish you could buy a pack of cheap flash drives
the way you buy a pack of DVDs. At any given time, all the technology/office
stores around carry a range of flash drives from $9.99 to $99.99. The capacity
you get for a dollar goes up over time, but they never offer a drive for less
than $10 (except the occasional advertised sale) or a package of multiple
small drives for less than $10.

~~~
cabirum
relevant: <http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/flashkus/>

Can't believe something like this does not exist yet.

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yellowbkpk
That was the longest way of saying "We now offer mailed USB flash drives as a
restore option for up to 28GB of data." I've ever seen.

~~~
batista
Yeah, saying that and also, you know, providing very insightful statistics
related to DVD use and some historical data on the matter. The part of the
article you somehow missed.

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eli
DVDs are ridiculously cheap to produce en masse. USB drives are getting
cheaper, but it's not really the same ball park.

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AndrewWarner
Finally! I had about 100 gigs to restore from another backup company. They
sent me a stack of DVDs. Now I have to feed them all to my computer, one at a
time.

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MicahWedemeyer
While I think this is a good move for backup restoration, I think it's a
little hasty to call DVDs dead. Redbox doesn't seem to mind raking in the cash
on a "dead" media format.

~~~
chillyconker
Can we at least call them annoying?

I for one find it exasperating how much time DVDs (and CDs) spend spinning up
and generally clicking about whilst for some reason simultaneously freezing
the rest of the computer. I bet most HN readers know the reason, but, come on,
we shouldn't have to be inconvenienced like this :-)

I haven't found an OS yet that reliably writes to DVDs. If I write a bunch of
pictures to a DVD, I need to check afterwards that they're all present and
correct. This can't just be down to my level of competence. It's a scandal.

Sometimes they spin at high revs so there's a virtual hair dryer in the
background while I watch my videos. Or they go slooww and cannot be coaxed to
copy my files in less than 103 minutes.

And they scratch quite easily too!

I wish we had something like those elegant crystals that Superman drops into
slots to access the Kryptonian archive. Some kind of optical flash linkage
ought to do the trick.

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yuvipanda
None of my computers have had a working DVD Drive for the las t 4-5 years and
I'm yet to go 'damn I need a DVD Drive!"'

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HPBEggo
So true. The DVD has run its course.

With more and more emphasis on remote storage rather than physical, present
storage mediums, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar phasing out occurred
among similar technologies.

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oconnore
Read-write media will never be as cheap as write-once-read-many media. Perhaps
DVD's are on the way out, but their replacement will not come in the form of
traditional USB flash drives.

For example, Blu-ray discs are about $0.03 per GB, where a USB flash drive is
approximately $1.00 per GB. Using flash memory for WORM style storage (like
backups) is just silly.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Never, ever, ever say "never" when it comes to tech. In 10-20 years they'll be
handing out 8 GB USB drives in gumball machines for 5 cents each, and 16 TB
flash drives will be $15 on amazon.

~~~
oconnore
I'm not the one saying never. Why do you anticipate progress with flash
storage but not with optical storage?

If we have the optical technology to render a certain number of floating gate
transistors in a certain area, we also have the optical technology to render
10-100x as many bits of raw data in that same area.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Optical technology has different limits than solid state technology.

The "blu[e]" in blu-ray is a reference to the shorter wavelength of read
lasers (relative to CDs/DVDs) necessary to cram more data on a disc. Trying to
cram 100x as much data onto a single optical disc layer would require use of a
laser with 1/10th the wavelength that blu-ray uses today, which would incur
all sorts of additional costs and complexities. Granted, it might be possible
to use other techniques (deep layering, holographic storage, etc.) to side-
step such problems, but who knows what the limits are? It's telling that there
isn't much research into next gen. optical storage compared to other storage
forms.

Additionally, increasingly people are embracing form-factors for computers
that do not accommodate optical drives (smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks),
which helps drive R&D money into the forms of storage that are more popular.

My point is that one cannot firmly say, a priori, that one format will "never"
be cheaper, larger, more popular, etc. than another. Technological progress is
rapid in storage.

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noonespecial
I keep a dvd drive on a shelf for "historical" purposes. Every once in a while
I have to read one.

Dvd jumped the shark right about the time I could download 4 gig in about the
same time it took to read it off a crummy dvd-r.

~~~
dangrossman
Watch how fast people start hitting Comcast's 250GB data cap in 2012 and on...
especially after people start trusting online backup providers, Amazon Cloud
Drive, etc with their files. That 250GB cap includes download and upload --
two months over the limit and you are terminated for 1 year, even if Comcast
is the only ISP servicing your region.

Watch one HD Netflix movie a night and you've used 105GB. Make a daily backup
of a 5GB folder to a cloud service and you've now gone over your monthly cap.
Goodbye internet. That's what keeps me from using online backup services. If
everyone is going to start downloading 4GB DVDs instead of buying software in
stores, too, something's gonna have to give.

~~~
ghshephard
If you have a gigabit connection, you can use 250 GBytes in about 45 minutes.
The solution is to make the networks faster, not avoid using them.

~~~
sbinetd
The solution is to be the only ISP in the area, and to strong-arm start-up
competitors out of business with year-long contracts that force you to pay for
months you have remaining upon cancellation.

Source: (I am secretly Brian Roberts - CEO of Comcast)

(Don't tell anyone)

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felipemnoa
It will be great once USB Flash Drives become as cheap as DVDs. For one thing
the memory of the flash drive will continue to increase while maintaining the
same form factor. And for another they don' damage as easily as a DVD.

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epaga
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling
down the highway." —Tanenbaum (1996)

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drivebyacct2
Nice of them to tell us what some of us have known for sometime... I haven't
used a DVD in... at least 4 years except for installing Office because it was
$10 on optical media from my University.

This feels more like an ad than anything else. It went: fact + backblaze pitch
+ fact + more backblaze pitch, and then it was over.

~~~
dangrossman
It's a feature announcement on a product blog. It's _supposed_ to feel like an
ad.

