As Jack Flesher recently commented on another thread about my external hard drive woes, this subject has been discussed ad nauseum. It cannot be resolved because each person tends to act upon his/her own experience.
If your next door neighboor happens to have bought a new car which turns out to be a 'lemon', gives no end of trouble and is back and forth to the mechanic many times during the warranty period, are you going to buy the same model of car? I think not, even though a certain rational part of your mind may be telling you, 'this is just a 'lemon'.
Those people who show discolored, fungus-covered pictures of so-called 'bit rot' on CDs or DVDs are in the same category as your next door neighbour with an automobile lemon.
My experience of CD/DVDs is that the archives actually improve with age. The media gets faster with time, when opening files. I imagine also that error correction improves as technology advances. Example, I have a couple of pirated DVD movies (bought in Thailand) which refuse to play on my 'stand alone' DVD player, but play just fine on my more modern computer DVD drive. I've had instances when my first Kodak Photo CD discs (now 12 years old) would not play on a new CD-ROM drive, which caused me some consternation because I thought the discs were physically deteriorating and gave Kodak hell, over their toll free line, untill I discovered the real culprit was a substandard CD-ROM drive.
It's my experience, that for long term, maintenance-free, forget-about, archival storage, the optical disc with no moving parts is still the most reliable.
Others may disagree, not necessarily as a result of any statistical information I would suggest, but because of their own personal experience with lemons.
There are also other considerations, such as the value you place on your own time. My calculations show that currently (in Australia) hard drives are about 5x the cost of DVD storage, but hard drives clearly save time. It would have been a lot quicker for me to have copied my recently lost 140Gb of images to a second hard drive, than copy those files to about 35 DVD discs.
In the long term, the cost might be far greater than 5x. For example, the cost of my first Kodak Photo CD, even including Kodak's charge of scanning thos slides for me, was far less than the cost of my first 850MB Western Digital hard drive, which was A$850. I remember this cost because of the coincidence of exactly $1 per MB.
If I'd stored just one 650mb CD-ROM on this hard drive at the time, how frequently would I have felt the need to re-transfer that data to more modern drives in the 12 year period. What would the total cost be now, 12 years later?
