Not bad, but what we/ I need is really an emulator with a proper IDE interface.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Not bad, but what we/ I need is really an emulator with a proper IDE interface.

This then?
http://www.memkor.com/en/products/cfdrives/142atapi.html

That's just a CF card socket, not a full CDROM emulator with audio.

Ok. I could not see any product pictures or anything.
It was a bit scarce on my phone, regarding info on the product.
Was a try worth it though.

I have had really lousy luck with USB drive booting

philscomputerlab wrote:

Would designing and building a USB based CD/DVD drive emulator be very difficult? I'm picturing something like a GOTEK, but also with an audio port at the back. In the front a USB header, LCD display and controls to select an image.

Zalman VE300. There's also the VE400 (encryption, not as reliable) and the VE200 (has an e-SATA interface as well, but the CD emulation doesn't work over it).

It's really quite convenient, but doesn't work in every system. When it does, it's damned fast, though. Installing Linux from an ISO on a hard drive inside the VE300, to an SSD was blindingly fast.

Anyone know about the quality of Philips CD-R's? I saw a 3 pack for 1 buck at dollar tree, but did not buy them.

ncmark wrote:

Not exactly brand new news but relatively recent.... taiyo yuden/JVC announced they are stopping production of optical media at the end of 2015

This is truly the end of an era. They pioneered the CD-R and made disks for many manufacturers. Many of the Sony disks I used with my first 2X cd-burner were made by them and are still perfectly readable today.

As far as I am concerned they are the last manufacturer of quality media. Maxell stopped making their own disks years ago and Verbtaim is outsourcing to second-tier manufactures.

That's so sad. 😢 😢 😢
Recently, I checked ALL of my optical media for errors with Nero DiskSpeed. I had various results, but all the Taiyo or JVC (made in Japan by Taiyo Yuden), and I mean ALL of them, had at least 50% less errors on average. Not only no-name ones, but also Sony, TDK etc etc. The only ones that were a bit better on average (but still miles away) are the Verbatim AZO series.
It was a surprising difference, even some badly scratched Taiyo disks were in OK reading condition.

I think I'll buy some 1000 of them before the phase-out, just to be on the safe side. Although nowadays I mainly use them at car's mp3 player, because it's embedded and I don't want to change it. 😊

ynari wrote:

Zalman VE300. There's also the VE400 (encryption, not as reliable) and the VE200 (has an e-SATA interface as well, but the CD emulation doesn't work over it).

It's really quite convenient, but doesn't work in every system. When it does, it's damned fast, though. Installing Linux from an ISO on a hard drive inside the VE300, to an SSD was blindingly fast.

Looks like a nice idea. Do you know if it supports CloneCD *.img files and other images ripped using Alcohol, etc?

Well they do come in handy from time to time, and are more affordable now than ever. I find older generations of tech-unsavvy people can handle putting a disc in a player and watching a movie, but trying to get them to play an MKV from a USB pen in the side of the LCD TV is like asking them to recite the bible backwards. I'm sure places like Currys and PC World here in the UK still sell 1.44" floppies on the shelf. There will be manufcacturers of DVD/CD media for many years to come.

But with pen drive prices crashing down lately, and their speeds increasing to almost HDD levels, there really is little need for collecting software on optical media anymore.

At the same time, sometimes I wonder how depressed I would be if my two 4TB externals USB HD's died on me, taking all 5000+ 1080p movies with them. I would probably cry...

Iris030380 wrote:

But with pen drive prices crashing down lately, and their speeds increasing to almost HDD levels, there really is little need for collecting software on optical media anymore.

I've considered using flash media for backup/archival purposes as well. What's the shelf-life/service-life like with flash drives? Do they suffer from something equivalent to CD/DVD rot or are they susceptible to something like magnetic interference for HDDs? How long can they sit idle/unused and still maintain the integrity of their stored data?

From about 1997 through 2005, I used CD media for backup/archive. After that, I switched to DVD media until about 2011. Since then, I've been using HDDs in USB enclosures both on-site and off-site. So far, it seems like the HDD solution has been the best as far as cost, speed, convenience, durability, and longevity. I do my on-site backups whenever I feel like it, but I bring home the off-site HDDs every 6 months and create a new full backup on them. In this manner, I figure the HDDs aren't sitting still long enough for any mechanical problems to set in.

I'd really like to hear what others think of the idea of using flash drives for archival purposes. If they don't suffer from magnetic interference or mechanical failures like HDDs, I may have to stock up on a few and rethink my data redundancy strategy. M-Disc sounds great and the cost is reasonable, but flash drives are re-writable.

Years ago, I converted all of my games collection to disc images. Along with the patches, manuals, mods, etc, it comes to almost 400GB of data that mostly sits idle. Failure due to non-use is a major concern for me on-site as well as off-site.

I agree with the sentiments that optical discs will continue to be available for a long time, however, I think *quality* discs are more of a concern. Taiyo Yuden is good quality at a reasonable price. With them out of the market, I fear the remaining options will either be extremely cheaply made discs, or "archival" discs that are prohibitively expensive for most usage.
TY's DVD+R discs are the only discs I've tried that work well on some really picky devices, which I think attests to how precisely they conform to standards. Specifically, the TY discs I've used are their DVD+R 8X discs with the MID code "YUDEN000-T02"

The TY 8X discs mentioned are an old series of discs which have stayed around for so long because they are quite good and well supported, so they've had a loyal following. I once bought a cheap spindle of 100 Ritek DVD+R discs at Fry's for $10. I tried them on my IDE burner and while they seemed to work, I think some had noticeable readability problems. In quality scans I found that the recording quality was awful. This was because the drive's firmware was too old to recognize the discs so it was using a generic burning strategy. On a newer drive with more recent firmware, the results were much better.
The TY discs mentioned above gave excellent results even on the old burner, and they seem to be more broadly compatible with everything than any inexpensive discs I've bought at local retail.
Currently I use both the cheap discs and the TYs depending on the need. Recently I sent a video DVD to an elderly relative and was glad I had the TYs available, because I'm confident they will work without issue on whatever player she has and will probably be long term reliable.

Due to mixed past experiences, flash memory worries me as a backup medium. However, maybe it would hold up in storage. I just have a hard time trusting it myself. Flash manufacturers make some fantastic claims about reliability, but I don't trust them.

I have a lot of files that are archived on a hard disk, which in turn is backed up using a typical software backup. I think that set of files is in the range of 200-300GB. These are my most protected files. This is where I dump any random file that I may want to keep permanently. I'm pretty sure there's some bloat, but I haven't cared enough to clean it out.

However, for storing large video files my current preference is using SnapRAID. It gives a reasonable level of redundancy without requiring 1:1 copies. For a number of reasons I much prefer this over traditional RAID.

For my ~250GB "regular files" archive, which is protected by typical software backup, I'm bothered by the fact that it has no protection against bit rot. SnapRAID does checksumming to protect against this, so I have thought about moving those regular files into SnapRAID. However, these files would still also need a regular software backup because the SnapRAID parity alone isn't sufficient for those files.
There are technical concerns with putting lots of small files or files that change frequently on SnapRAID. The author doesn't encourage it for at least a couple reasons that I'm aware of. SnapRAID was designed for large files that are mostly static. I've hesitated because of these issues, but I'd really like some bit rot protection.

Well i uploaded all of my stuff already to One Drive, all 8TB of data, Microsoft just loves me I'm sure 🤣

I wish I had the know-how to make something like an IDE CD-ROM Drive Emulator. Just not sure how complicated it will be. I reckon you'll need something to read/write/format to USB drive to FAT32, then you'll need a chip that can read the ISO files and you'll need something to communicate with the IDE bus and create the analogue audio output.

Most companies that do serious backup/archival will use tape. There's a bunch of competing tape standards, but I believe most are on a modern incarnation of LTO at this point.

Someone has submitted a PATA to Raspberry Pi bridge to the Hackaday Prize contest. It might be a viable option for presenting BIN/CUE pairs (from GoG, for instance) as a true CD or DVD disk to real DOS hardware with some extension work.
https://hackaday.io/project/20774-netpi-ide#

gdjacobs wrote:

Someone has submitted a PATA to Raspberry Pi bridge to the Hackaday Prize contest. It might be a viable option for presenting BIN/CUE pairs (from GoG, for instance) as a true CD or DVD disk to real DOS hardware with some extension work.
https://hackaday.io/project/20774-netpi-ide#

If they could rig something up with the headphone jack for analog audio output, they'd have a real winner on their hands.

I wonder how many years we will have to wait before there is a proper hardware level emulator just for convenience sake.