So, recently dvd media has gotten a lot cheaper. I picked up 50 printable 1x dvd-r discs from Fry’s for $60 bucks the other day and am now engaged in some archiving action. I currently have about 300GB of data that needs backup. I’m still going to be rolling the Linux RAID, but even fault tolerance built into RAID 5 cannot tolerate a failure of 2 disks. Say one of your controller cards goes out for instance and takes out 2 disks with it.
I’m wishing that I had spent the extra $20 and gotten the 4x printable dvd-rs now. I just picked up a Lite-On 411 drive. It’s got some pretty impressive specs on it. It writes DVD+R at 8x, DVD-R at 4x, CD-R at 40x and CD-RW at 12x. This thing spanks the Pioneer 106 drive. I also got it at best buy for $150. A screaming deal. It can be had online for as little as $112 from pricewatch.
How does it work with my Mac you might ask? Well Toast 6 has no problem with it at all, but you will need to beat Jaguar or Panther into submission to make it work with iTunes, Finder and Disc Copy. Here is a link to the process for making panther use this drive regularly. The drive is bootable, but it did not like booting to Apple Hardware Test on my machine. I put it in to replace my Lite-On 48x CD burner. If they built support for this drive into Panther, it would be a good replacement to the Superdrive that comes installed in the G5s. One of my main reasons for not getting the G5 is the slow CD burning inherent with the DVD burners that ship in them.
Now that CD burning is not cutting it for backup of my data. 4x DVD burning is a very desirable option. This drive is a good way to go.