microflex 66b computer

[RJ Johnston]

I've been using the same Memorex DVD+RW disk for the past two years. Every once in a while I wash it off with dishwasher liquid soap.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Verbatim DVD -RW Ken. No issues to date (hope I'm not speaking too soon and tempting fate there )

[Bob]

I hope by upgrading, you meant add a 2nd disk drive and not just change the 320gb to 500gb. I second Jack's 2GB RAM recommendation. That's what I currently have and find it adequate even when I have Photoshop, Bridge, and Premiere open at the same time. You'll love the Q6600 quad processor. It's great.

I had to chuckle about the mention of Maxtor drives being unreliable. I remember when Seagate and Western Digital were the cheap unreliable brands and Maxtor was the reliable one that you wanted for your servers. Times change. Seagate purchased Maxtor a while ago and I understand shut down the manufacturing facilities. Seagate is now using the Maxtor brand name to distribute it's budget line of drives -- So, recent Maxtor drives are, in fact, Seagate drives.

I've actually got one of the newer Maxtor drives and it's been excellant -- I check the drive info collected by S.M.A.R.T. periodically and I've seen no problems or issues so far. I got it for use as a scratch disk so reliability wasn't a huge issue at the time and it was on sale for a price I couldn't refuse. I noticed that the stack of drives at the store were mixed with some boxes labeled with a 1 year warrenty and others a 3 year warrenty -- for the same model. Don't know what was going on with that. I got one with the 3 year warrenty.

I use DVD's for backup up projects, but not my drives. I prefer an external drive for that. I don't care for rewritable CDs or DVDs. The only times I've ever had problems retrieving files later were when I used rewritable media. I just don't trust them. I also only use quality discs.

Backups are essential. You never know what will happen. I just recently had my power supply die while I was using the computer. The voltage surge when the power supply failed took out the video card and may have affected the motherboard. I'm getting some strange intermittant flakiness. I'm going to replace the motherboard to be on the safe side. My drives were unaffected, but only because I wasn't writing to one at the time. The drive could easily have been clobbered and I would have been up the creek if I had not had a backup.

[bgsnmky]

I did just order 100 of the Taiyo Yuden as I have been reading on here that people have had good luck with them or Verbatim. I am planning on backing up to the DVD's also...

Thanks.

[bgsnmky]

I hope I haven't moved them around too much that it impacts the quality.

That's the beauty of digital vs. analog... you can move the data around all you want, as long as the files aren't being converted or compressed they will maintain maximum quality

I thought I read somewhere that each time you view a picture you lose quality. Is it not the same for moving from one place to another (ie. external drive back to my new internal hard drive).

[Chuck Engels]

Every time you edit and save an image you loose quality, at least for jpeg files.
Same goes for video, AVI and others. But just opening the file to view doesn't do anything and neither does moving the file from one location or drive to another.

[RJ Johnston]

Losing quality is something that would happen everytime you played a VHS tape in your VCR.

[bgsnmky]

cool..thanks