<p>I've been around for a while, along with many others here. I've been through Syquest drives, Zip and Jaz drives, tape, etc. All of these units have slowly disappeared, and for good reason. They weren't reliable. The removable idea is a great one, but it turns out that the devices lacked the tight control of a dedicated device. If you take apart a hard drive, you will find rare earth magnets that hold the stylus half the thickness of a human hair off the drive platters. They are incredibly strong. Removable devices have not been able to match the tight specs, and thus the lack of reliability.</p>
<p>We were told when the CD's came out that the laser chipped into the plastic of the CD and that the data would last forever. (Once again.) And once again, it was a lie. People report that they put their very valuable data on one of these discs, and every once in a while they can't get it off again.</p>
<p>Anyone that uses CD's and DVD's must be willing to lose whatever they put on there. There is no way of knowing when one of these will fail. In a number of years, CD's will be gone, so will DVD's and Blu-Ray. Everything is moving to the cloud. Netflix will not be sending discs thru the mail when the internet gets reasonable fast at delivery, which despite the efforts of the larger providers like Comcast, it ultimately will.</p>
<p>The only way to solve this is to use hard drives. They are cheap. And yes, you have to buy new ones as the technology moves along. We no longer use SCSI drives, Firewire 400 or ATA. Now its Serial ATA, or SATA, and soon it may be Thunderbolt, or maybe not. Maybe a USB 4? However, when that time happens, I will move all my data over there before there is nothing I can plug it into to read it...</p>
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