I have a new computer!

Just to split hairs because I am petty:
VLC is potentially hundreds of mebibytes smaller than MPC since MPC requires codecs being installed in the OS, whereas VLC has them built into the program.

In a very lean example, the commonly used codecs are only a few mebibytes. But to have the full support of any media you can get your hands on, that is no less than fifty mebibytes And in my case is closer to three hundred mebibytes. (I like to have every potentially needed codec installed at all times so I have no need to search out things as I need them.)

Also, since your post kinda blurs the line of what you get with K-Lite Codec Packs:
*Edit* The above line is left in since I did type it, but then I bothered to read your post again and I see that I was wrong about what you said. Ignore that line.

The K-Lite Mega Codec Pack comes with "Media Player Classic Home Cinema". (MPCHC features GPU decoding and rendering of almost everything that would otherwise be a strain on the CPU to decode. Things like Blu-Rays and x264/AVC/H264 can be decoded and rendered with almost zero CPU work with MPCHC.)

 

I think when he said "lighter" he meant memory use or how smooth it runs, not how much place it takes on your HDD.

But other than that, whatever. I don't feel entitled to reply to that since I've been using the K-Lite codec set for some time and am thus likely biased.

 

Yep, I was reffering to strain on my CPU and my RAM, not HDD. HDD space is the cheapest thing on earth nowadays, even if you love to rip DVDs like I do

 

I am going to buy a 2TB HDD next month. I have been putting it off for over a year now. But I have less than 20GB free space on my massive TB drives...

And I run a SSD as my primary OS drive. So I have gotten to know how to save space. Still I could install every codec on Earth ten times over and have room to spare. I just read your post wrong in my reply. I left my reply intact since I had bothered to post it.

 

I do not trust Seagate since I had six DoA in a row from them. I paid more in shipping the drive back for RMA than I paid for the drive to begin with. And I never got a working drive from them since I stopped trying to RMA it and just bought a Western Digital brand drive that I am still using.

What I am currently looking at is this:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245
It is a Samsung drive. It has ~1500 reviews on Newegg and looks good. I have never had a Samsung drive, but I think it may be worth the risk.

I would probably try the drive you linked in if it were not USB. I have an eSATA dock for my drives. That is how I will use the drive I buy. I have no USB 3 ports yet. I am not willing to buy Seagate due to my experiences with them, and I am not convinced I could disassemble the dock for that drive you linked in to use it in my eSATA dock without voiding the warranty.

But if the price remains low, I may splurge and starve buying this one:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136792

That is a premium drive. I doubt I would regret that purchase.

*Edit* I was wrong about the Samsung drive above. It is actually a rebranded Seagate garbage drive now. Shame on Seagate for fucking up the good name of Samsung by shipping their own defective drives out as the Samsung brand.

I guess there are just the two drive makers to pick from yet again...

 

And I just buy cheap (but not the cheapest) disks and pair them into RAID-1 arrays. Sure, it does cost more that way, but it's still not that much and at least the risk of both disks failing to work at once is really low.

 

I have two identical 1TB drives with copies of all the data. So when one eventually dies I will have a backup from the last time I bothered to archive things. It is connected via that eSATA port I already mentioned, so even if my computer exploded, the external would be largely unaffected. (I even unplug the eSATA cord from the drive bay when I am not using it.)

But yeah, I probably just had really terrible luck or a delivery person who liked throwing packages at brick walls all day before delivering them. There may be no difference. Some swear for one company and no others, while an equal group swears for the others.

I think I will likely just buy a cheap 2TB blindly and see what I get. But I will be much more vocal this time than last. I will not play nice if they ship me a defective drive. I will be a total jerk and declare to the world that they are intentionally ripping people off.

And as we discussed in another thread, there are many things you simply cannot archive via the cloud. I backup my purchased DVDs. I image them and never touch the disc again. If I were to put those on the cloud, even without doing something criminal like sharing them, they would be deleted at once. (Because the hash value of the images are already known.)

For instance, I recently bought Guild Wars 2. I imaged the discs and then installed it. I will never again touch the original discs. If I ever needed to reinstall, I would mount the images as needed. But even though the game data is useless to anyone without a purchased copy since it is multiplayer only and requires a purchased copy to play, the hashes of the images are known and would likely be grounds not only to delete the offending data, but also to delete everything else on the account and end the contract for a violation of the terms of service with whatever cloud storage solution you use.

Obviously this applies much more to games that have no such online verification, and to other forms of media without protection from abuse and piracy.

If there was a cloud storage solution that promised not to hash my files and look for what I am storing, and was a better price over time than buying a hard drive, I would gladly do that. But I can understand why they would be disinclined to do that. It would be ridiculous to archive multiple copies of common files that people should not store on cloud based storage anyway. Like my previous example in yet another thread where I mentioned the only way I found to get my purchased copy of "Saints Row 2" working without Steam was to use a pirated copy... I keep the image of the pirated copy on my hard drives. But since that time I have finally started using Steam, and may have to delete that copy now.

Well this post reminded me to free another 7GB of space! Win!

 

We discussed Spideroak a while ago and the reason I reject it is still the same. It costs $10 per month per 100GB. And they use a de-duplication method, so they can say what they want, but they absolutely know if you have certain files they already have a hash for. Any company can request they delete and lockout an image of a disc by hash alone. And they need not "Violate User Privacy" to do it.
https://spideroak.com/personal_pricing/
https://spideroak.com/faq/questions/15/does_spideroak_backup_open_files/
https://spideroak.com/faq/questions...t_backup_deduplication_from_compressed_files/

I think I posted those links before in the other thread we discussed this in. But oh well. I am pretty certain David does not want to hang me or being off-topic.

*Edit* Two more...
https://spideroak.com/faq/questions/564/what_is_deduplication/
https://spideroak.com/blog/20090112220000-what-does-i_-mn--v_r-__--_-_-_c_

 

Sorry, but saving in the cloud is not backupping. Saving in the cloud is convenient, and the hardware is safe I guess. But administration error/ the company going bust/ selling your data still fucks you over. And that is without user error on your side, or your account getting hacked.
And if you have a lot of data to backup, it will be pretty slow as well, especially when you want to access them somewhere else.
And that's not even speaking of having no internet at all
I'm very sceptic of keeping any important things in any cloud, I've heard too many bad stories, and it costs you a lot more money than a hard drive in just one year, for less storage. I mean, you get a 32 GB stick for what, 20$ nowadays. And that should be enough to haul the most important data around.

 

If you go that way, you could say that anything other than a RAID-1 array with a lot of disks is not really a backup. Because there's always the risk of losing both the original data and the copy at the same time, no matter what method of backing your data up you use.

 

For me, a backup is something I have control over, like a RAID array or external hard drives. Having the data in the cloud puts me at the mercy of someone else, and makes my data globally accessible for persons who have the means. As long as there is no user error or cracking going on and you have an internet connection, you have extremely good chances of keeping the data.
For me it's more about the control

 

Then you just don't like being dependent on other people when it is not necessary. I'm like that too when it comes to data; heck, that was the reason why I worked on my own computer instead of using the one accessible at the university for the programming (and some other as well) courses - I did not like the fact that I would not be the one on whom the safety of the data depended.

But I stand by the point that an online backup is still a backup, even if not an ideal one.

 

True that, it was a very placative statement. It's a backup, just not one I like.

 

http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/mass-storage-devices.3416/

Here is where we discussed this all back in June. Just throwing it out in case anyone wants to continue the discussion.

 

TL DR

Back to the off topic stuff about storage. I have my logins and passwords and such backed up in multiple locations. Even a USB Flash drive I have on my keychain with Linux Mint installed as well. So anywhere I go I have everything I could need to get back to doing everything I do. I would not dream of using the cloud to store such things even if it were an encrypted file like a Truecrypt container. And I dare say those are the absolute most secure method you can get for free.

(Using a Whirlpool hash with AES-256 + Blowfish-448 + Serpent in some order will defeat the mere chance someone can brute force it in the next century even if CPUs were thousands of times the power they currently are and millions of them were used. Blowfish is the best by far in my never humble opinion, but layered cryptography is always better since even weak ciphers cannot be broken with several layers.)

But my specific need for space is not for the few mebibytes of data I need for my logins and passwords and such. It is for archival of all the stuff I collect over the years. A dual layer DVD image is just shy of eight gibibytes. And a one teribyte hard drive formats out to roughly 970 gibibytes. (For those who are wondering what this mega/mebi giga/gibi stuff is, read this link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte)

So every terabyte of drive space is 970 / 8 = 121.25 dual layer DVDs. At around a hundred dollars each, they are far cheaper than buying DVD media and hoping they endure the burn and are not destroyed by something stupid like those awful bugs that I mentioned in the Mass Storage Devices thread. So far, I have never even heard of bugs attempting to eat hard drives.

I think my solution to the significant risk of a dead drive on delivery is to buy them at a local store. If they do not work I will take them right back. (I will ask them specifically if they accept returns if the drive is DoA or if they require me to submit an RMA. No deal if they require an RMA.) As much as it will hurt, I will have to buy a single terabyte drive first, then buy another in a month or two as a backup of that data. If the drive fails in that time then I lose a lot. But it will be better than waiting several months longer to get a larger drive, and then several months after that to get another to backup the first.

I know Kazeto suggests building a RAID-1 array. But that is actually a worse plan for me since I have only the integrated RAID controller and whenever I have to replace my motherboard the array and all data in it would be potentially destroyed. Also TLER is OFF on all drives not sold for RAIDs these days. And although it is a simple switch in the firmware to enable it, hard drive makers have 'effed us all over by disabling that "Feature" to force us to pay several times as much to get a drive that is absolutely identical except that they used their own firmware to switch TLER on. (TLER is Time Limited Error Recovery. If it is not on, then the RAID array will eventually decide that it waited too long on one drive and flag that drive as dead. You then have to reformat and rebuild the array.)

Using the drives as separate drives with identical content works best for me since I only need to have one drive in my PC at any given time, and the other can be mounted every once in a while to copy the new data to it. If one drive fails for some reason, the other is still perfectly usable. The only benefit to a RAID-1 array is read speed. And I am not concerned with that. If I had a ~$400 RAID card I could take any two drives of equal size and make a RAID-5 array from them. This sounds stupid, but a quality RAID card can and will do just that. I can then just start adding drives as I see fit and have perfect reliability as well as improved read and write speeds. If any one drive failed, the array would still work, but it would require that I replace the drive with one the same size or larger.

Good RAID cards do things integrated RAID controllers pretend is impossible. And the bulk of the work is done on the card itself. So your system does not get lags due to the array like it would with a RAID-5 on an integrated controller.

I am blabbing. Oh well. I am shutting up now...

 

Everybody posting about HDD's. My HDD is 800Gb, ain't got no backup. Who needs them (inb4 computer crash + data loss, I know really).