'Cheap As Chips'!

[Yorkie]

In my thread 'resistors ten a penny', I said 'it's worth browsing the sellers 'shop' for other bargains'.

EG, memory sticks from 1GB up to 64 GB USB 2/3 - your choice of size - all one price, £1.95 post free:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BESTRUNNER-1-2-4-8-16-32-64-GB-USB-2-0-3-0-Flash-Memory-Stick-Swivel-Thumb/191232569119?rt=nc&_soffid=5005804206&_soffType=OrderSubTotalOffer&_trksid=p5731.m3795

Literally, 'as cheap as chips' - 64 GB memory stick for the price of a bag of chips.

A far cry from the days when I paid £28 each for four 1 MB SIMMs! (And £175 for a 105 MB hard drive).

Ho hum...

[Joe]

All is not as it first seems, David:-

   

Still reasonable but not the huge bargain suggested.

These are one thing I WOULD be very careful of buying as a lot of the large size ones are actually small ones re-formatted in an odd way which most things can't read.  I'm not suggesting these ones are but it's something to be aware of.

I remember paying £200 for a 30MB hard disk and £75 for a DS/DD 3½" floppy drive.

— Joe

[ppppenguin]

Picking up on Joe's point, I've heard that a lot of cheap memory sticks really aren't very good. For the small quantities that I need I'll stick to known branded stuff such as Kingston and Crucial.

Also worth noting that flash memory sticks and cards can't really be relied on for archival purposes. Ideal for short term (less than a few years) data storage but not for permanance. This may open up a wider discussion

[Joe]

I get cheap ones, anybody can stick a logo on something and even the retailer could be deceived, and haven't had any problems yet. I always stick with the smaller sizes though as there's less information to loose either through corruption or physical loss — and I'm quite capable of the latter! — and I only tend to use them for copying from PC to PC.

I'm not sure what would be best for archival purposes as I've got audio CD-Rs which are ten to fifteen years old that now won't play properly.

The stuff I value I make sure I have several copies of. I've got a couple of old computers which are really too slow for modern use but they are handy to back stuff up onto. Data you've only one copy of is data you don't care about.

— Joe

[Yorkie]

All is not as it first seems, David:-



Still reasonable but not the huge bargain suggested.


— Joe

Ooops - thanks Joe - I'd not clicked on colour choice so it hadn't updated the price.

(I don't have a need for any sticks - I've got half a dozen or so).

The total contents of my hard drive (well actually, an SSD drive now) only amounts to 67 GB.

Like you Joe, I tend to have multiple copies of CDs/DVDs.

I don't really have any data of any kind that would cause me any dramas if it were lost forever, but I appreciate that others might have.

(Brands don't mean anything nowadays - many brands don't manufacture anything - it's outsourced to factories in China Taiwan etc. EG: Maplin is owned by the same outfit that owns Bernard Matthews and Pizza Hut, and most of what they sell is generic stuff that comes from China. Some of their branded items can be found on e-bay at much less cost but without being overprinted with the Maplin name).

[Mark Hennessy]

I've probably got about half a TB of photos that would be a real loss. Like Joe, I use the "multiple machines" approach. So far so good...

Memory sticks are modern floppy discs. Used to get things between different machines when that is the easiest method. They multiply, and they hide, and they fail. I recently chucked out about a dozen of the damn things. I still have too many...

I would never trust CDR.

[Refugee]

I tend to stick with one kind of card reader and use SDHC cards like floppy disks.
The readers are pretty cheap and so are the cards so I make sure all gadgets I buy that use memory also take SD cards so that I can benefit from the faster speed of transfer to computer for things like photos.
They also sell tiny SD cards for mobile phones that fit my reader with an adapter that often comes with the card if you buy the retail pack first time. These tiny ones get lost too easily so I will only use them if it is essential to do so.

[ppppenguin]

I reckon the best archive medium that's cheap and readily available is an ordinary "spinning rust" hard drive. Not a SSD. Keep more than one copy and if you're paranoid use different makes of drive for those copies.

Recordable DVD is useless as an archive medium, CDR can be OK but you need the right discs and it's still only 700MB per disc. Anything using decent flash, including SSDs, is OK for a while but hardly permanent beyond a few years. At least SSDs don't drop down the back of the sofa But I'd still want a copy on a conventional HDD

To go beyond this you need high capacity tape drives which are expensive, not convenient and distinct overkill for domestic use.

[Joe]

I suppose that most of us won't keep the same copies long-term due to changes in technology. I've got stuff that was originally on floppies, then transferred to CD and now resides on SD cards as well. No doubt something will replace those in due course.

— Joe

[Nick]

Certain brands definitely mean something ...

e.g. Crucial is the retail arm of Micron, one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world (in the top 5 - a USD 32 billion business). Over the years I have bought in excess of GBP 100,000 (probably closer to GBP 200,000) worth of memory from them of various sorts and have never had any of it fail.

My staff have Kingston 128Gb secure USB sticks we use all the time for data transfer - never had one fail.

There is the cheap and there is the right way of doing memory. Stick to the reputable manufacturers (not repackagers) and you won't go far wrong...