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Sarge

Spent a lot of time the last few days researching optical drives,  not a whole lot of options. A few use a power supply,  but most use Y cables to get enough power to supply the drive when burning disks, which uses up two ports. I'd prefer a vertical position,  but those seem rare and also seem to have a higher failure rate - great for making expensive "coasters". Don't have a lot of space on the desk, either.

 

Blu-ray would be great,  but not totally necessary. Not thrilled with built-in USB cables as most are quite short, especially the Y types. Really want a USB 3.0, slot load (instead of fragile trays), blu-ray capable (at least for playback) and include a blu-ray player software.

For whatever reason,  that drive, under those requirements,  doesn't exist or I just can't find it.

 

What is everyone else using?

 

Sarge

 

Edited by Sarge
dumb tablet

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pfrederi

Hardly ever use the DVD drive.  Just got a new desk top for the other half she does on occasion use disks.  The optical drive is mounted vertically on the front of the tower.  makes loading and emptying a real PIA  What laser rocket scientist came up with that???

 

Wonder how long before CD/DVDs become as outmoded as 5.5 inch floppies or even the 3.5inch plastic ones.  still have a bunch in the closet no way to use them.  Guess it was nothing I really needed:P

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Sarge

Yeah, in a way,  guess I'm the last rat off a sinking ship. Problem is,  I've got a ton of archives stored on CD & DVD already and at minimum would like to be at least able to load them up to a Passport backup drive. Many I had planned to consolidate onto higher capacity disks. I do not trust SSD or chip storage, they can degrade too easily or corrode. Not to mention mag fields...

 

Sarge

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r356c

Only papyrus paper for me! Seriously Sarge, you bring up a very valid point with todays storage mediums.

 

Edit, add: Yup, even the Father of the Internet is talking about the digital dark age.

Edited by r356c

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Sarge

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, or like the many paranoid EMF/ bug out types. But, I have had problems with the digital storage formats that are chip-based. Several SD cards that are suddenly unreadable, SSD that died without warning ,and now 2 different thumb drives that went blank.

The SSD, pretty certain that was the result of a local power surge we had last fall, 22,000 volts is tough on things. Blew up 3 surge protectors here, fried 2 breakers and killed one electric meter. Com Ed had a high voltage line break loose from an insulator and shot the high current into town on one leg of the 7500v primary. They still haven't figured out how it got past the stop breakers, but it did and cost them a lot of claims for damage. None of my main equipment or the welder got hurt, but I'd bet it didn't help that Dell that failed 4 months later.

 

SD cards are not protected from high magnetic fields,  erased a large storage card in my phone with my Miller running high frequency AC on aluminum. The card can't even be re-written now. That was expensive, lesson learned  - keep my phone at least 30' away now when using the tig welder. If you research,  thumb drives that went blank are usually traced to speakers creating a field near them. So, not a fan, prefer a hard trusted medium for storage.

 

I'll keep hunting,  someone has to make an optical drive that fits what I need. May just go the home-built route using an internal optical drive and power supply to feed it. That would be cheaper anyway and give a lot more options.

 

Sarge

 

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RandyLittrell
On 3/24/2018 at 2:20 PM, Sarge said:

Spent a lot of time the last few days researching optical drives,  not a whole lot of options. A few use a power supply,  but most use Y cables to get enough power to supply the drive when burning disks, which uses up two ports. I'd prefer a vertical position,  but those seem rare and also seem to have a higher failure rate - great for making expensive "coasters". Don't have a lot of space on the desk, either.

 

Blu-ray would be great,  but not totally necessary. Not thrilled with built-in USB cables as most are quite short, especially the Y types. Really want a USB 3.0, slot load (instead of fragile trays), blu-ray capable (at least for playback) and include a blu-ray player software.

For whatever reason,  that drive, under those requirements,  doesn't exist or I just can't find it.

 

What is everyone else using?

 

Sarge

 

 

 

Found this at Microcenter. Is this what you are looking for?

 

http://www.microcenter.com/product/385149/SBW-06D2X-U_External_Blu-ray_Writer

 

 

 

Randy

 

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Sarge

Similar,  but using the more up to date USB 3.0 interface.

 

I'm looking into the powered drive bays, you can use those along with the higher quality internal drives in the thin laptop style or the standard desktop size 5.25 bay. In the end, still portable and has it's own wall power instead of drawing off the motherboard. I'll post up what I come up with, it seems a better option to help keep excess heat out of the computer anyway.

 

Sarge

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Sarge

This is what I have in mind-

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MRUN0HQ/?coliid=I2KN8Y8BID0Z3A&colid=1TZBC5YKI8D8O&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

 

This type of self-powered bay will run either an optical drive or even a HDD drive for storage. May use it to try to recover more of what is sitting on the old XP desktop too. Not sure if it will recognize that drive as a storage device without being directly on a motherboard,  but it's worth a shot. Been checking prices on BD disks and such - pricing is coming down but still painful.

 

The next thing is to find a good quality DVD burner capable of BD format as well as the M-disk layer technology. This stuff is still fairly new and a lot of drives are proving to be less than reliable for what they cost. Trying to keep the cost down since things are advancing so fast, buy today and tomorrow it's outdated..

So far from reviews it looks like Pioneer or Asus are the best bang for your buck. It's a risk either way,  make an error on a DVD-R (coaster) it's irritating , make a bad multi-layer BD disk - that plain hurts.

 

 

 

Sarge

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Sarge

I've said for years Microsoft was going to drop the core OS and move to cloud based "services", it started with Win mobile phone devices and lasted one year, barely. In the process of wanting to get into the mobile phone market they bought out Nokia and ruined it completely. Best phones ever made and they generally ran flawlessly. My wife still has a Nokia 1650 that got one core update that rendered it's microphone dead, still won't work to this day but it does run fine otherwise. This happened at only 7mo of age. On top of that,  the older upper models of Nokia stopped working and users were forced to get a Windows phone or go elsewhere  - my N8 died and that pi$$edged me off enough that I went to Android. Her 1650 is still running,  somehow.

 

That alone proved they didn't know what they were doing nor cared and shortly thereafter dropped the mobile phone market and started working on the app-based Win10 platform, which I saw as the major move to cloud services. Google started it with their Chrome machines,  now the whole market is headed in that direction. Yeah, it's time to get very serious about learning Linux systems if you want to use a pc in any form of the traditional manner,  there will be no other real choice very soon. Various players have adopted the rule of "just do it and beg for forgiveness later" ideal, similar to how a lot of us acquire a new tractor,  lol.

 

Recently,  I've spent hours going through all the reasons for storage and backup and learned a lot I had no real clue about - mostly being the lifespan of storage mediums. Hard drives,  being mechanical devices can/will fail, we know that. Magnetic tape can stretch and degrade,  the death of floppy disks was known the day they were invented. Storage chips and SSD's have a limited number of write/move/erase cycles,  must be powered often to prevent discharge leakage and can be zapped clean by magnetic fields or static. Cloud storage services can fail,  get hacked and cost money that adds up to crazy amounts. I use hard copies on DVD for a reason but their lifespan depends on quality and is generally 5-10yrs max. Now, with high quality quad layer Blu-ray,  storage space goes up to 128gb and the new generation of M-disk layer technology has made storage mediums that can last for decades.The obvious answer in my opinion is to stick with disk storage as a permanent backup solution. I like the idea of using a dedicated hard drive and software to back up files and the OS, moving critical files bi-yearly to hard M-disk and properly keeping those for years so things don't get lost.

 

Ordered an Asus BW-16D1T DVD burner capable of BD format and M-disk yesterday,  as well as a self powered SATA tray to convert it to USB 3.0 for a standalone unit. This way, it's portable if necessary,  doesn't heat up the motherboard in the pc and can record at 5gb/s in a more stable platform. We'll see how it works,  need to back up files off my phone and save the digital pictures to disk before I lose another micro-SD card. I'll try to update results later. Looking forward to learning Linux,  I hate Microsoft and it's time to move now before they destroy it any further.

 

Sarge

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Sarge

Finally got the computer in yesterday morning - spent the rest of the day/evening loading saved file disks onto the hard drive, burned a recovery disk on DVD and pretty much wore my eyes out. The Asus burner performs flawlessly, installed it into the Vantec drive and ran it directly to the pc with a USB 3.0 cable. The Vantec enclosure is powered by a wall adapter, so no drag on the PC's power supply or the board. I even took the time to remove the 128gb micro SD card out of my phone and copied its contents onto the PC's drive for now. Got 22GB in that one folder - soon to be burned onto a BD-R M-disk as soon as the blanks get here.

 

Still need to decide on a backup hard drive, as well as a USB 3.0 hub so I have enough ports. Nice to settle back into a Lattitude, much more comfortable to use and nice to have Win7 Pro 64 again. I do need to get rid of some of the bloatware, startup is a bit slow but liveable for now. I may use an additional SATA hard drive and set the machine up for boot options to run Linux on a separate drive, this machine is equipped with a 500GB hard disk and I don't want to have to partition it to run Linux alongside Win7. I did install an additional 8GB of DDR4/2400 ram before booting it, glad I did since the disk burner and the 3.0 cable slams the main drive with a lot of data - runs quite smooth but still has some lag at times. Being an i5 processor doesn't help, but at least it's a quad-core @2.6GHZ. Still regret that I never purchased Win7 years ago when we still had the option, but I'm headed towards Linux anyway - to heck with Microsoft. The intrusive, nanny-driven, spying nature of Win10 is enough to put me off away from it, I don't accept that people should be the product and not the customer, which is what they are doing now.

 

So far, so good - at least I'm not going blind or fighting that dumb tablet anymore, truly hate that thing.

 

Sarge

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SteveK440

I'm using Linux Mint Debian edition on a old dell Optiplex 745 dual core with Firefox and love it! Plenty of online community support, updates itself, can run most Windows programs, and not a memory pig if you have at least 2 gig. Bill Gates got plenty of funding from me when I tried to learn MSCE! Oh and here is a tip, want to enlarged wording on your Monitor? Press the Crtl. Button (left of your keyboard) and the "+" button (located right of your keyboard at the number pad) at the same time. To decrease use the crtl key and the "-" button.

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Sarge

I've been leaning more towards the Linux Mint versions, been watching and learning a lot from this UK professor since he can explain things better for those of us that not so computer literate. I know just enough to be truly dangerous - I can kill one well enough an expert can never get it to refire, lol...

 

 

Figure I've 2yrs to get comfortable with Linux - Microslob sure isn't going to help the situation and frankly, in the direction that things are heading - I don't trust them.

 

Sarge

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Lost Pup

Sarge

One item I would recommend is a router attached HD. Your 802.11ac wifi is plenty fast and keeping storage at the router side allow access across devices. Samba shares , FTP , Video shares all easy to setup for multiple users. You can also allow external access ( your own internet cloud) as well. I have a ASUS router RT-AC68U with a Toshiba External USB 3.0 , 2.0 GB hd connected.

 

Flawless performance across IPADs, Android Tablets, Multiple Laptops.

One trick I have done with the laptops is to add a internal SSD HD as a secondary boot device . Adjust the laptop bios to boot from the SSD and install the clean operating system of your choice.

Leave the original boot hd alone if you wish and setup a any clean operating system on the new SSD.  I have the various Windows installs setup on USB key drives. Just boot to the USB and let the install run. 

 

Many laptops even the cheaper base units run exceptional fast on the SSD and with all of the factory junk ware removed. A quick check of the control panel system and you can see if any unique drivers are needed for your laptop.

I store all drivers on the wifi attached drives for safe keeping.

Edited by Lost Pup

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SteveK440
6 hours ago, Sarge said:

I've been leaning more towards the Linux Mint versions, been watching and learning a lot from this UK professor since he can explain things better for those of us that not so computer literate. I know just enough to be truly dangerous - I can kill one well enough an expert can never get it to refire, lol...

 

 

Figure I've 2yrs to get comfortable with Linux - Microslob sure isn't going to help the situation and frankly, in the direction that things are heading - I don't trust them.

 

Sarge

Your Professor makes good sense, stick with him. He is correct about some programs will not work with linux but there are work arounds. I'm currently learning a Linux program called free CAD. In addition, I'm currently trying to find a Linux program that can program my Uniden Radio Scanner. What I would do is take an inventory of what you wish to do with your computer and Google if Linux will fit your needs. Second don't be scared about learning loading Linux applications from a command line prompt if the time comes. You can always copy the instructed command from your web browser (using your mouse) and paste it to the Linux command line prompt to speed up time and avoid errors.

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r356c

My super brief history of Linux...

 

AT&T Unix. Used by lots of mil contractors that needed a  bullet proof operating system that would stay running for years without a blue screen of death.

"AT&T Unix, development starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others."

 

Let's not forget the C programming language, still used at the core of the Linux operating system. It's fast and can talk to hardware almost as fast as assembly language.

The first edition of The C Programming Language, published in 1978, was the first widely available book on the C programming language. Dennis Ritchie. Brian Kernighan wrote the first C tutorial.

 

Richard Stallman, is the founder of the Free Software movement, the GNU project. All of the various bits and pieces of device drivers, compilers, helper routines and on and on were organized by the GNU project.

 

Linus Torvalds, the genius that wrote a kernel for the ground work laid by Stallman.  Linus + Unix = Linux.

 

The stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform offers military-grade security, support across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, and much more.

Debian is a Unix-like computer operating system that is composed entirely of free software and packaged by a group of individuals participating in the Debian Project.

 

Mint and Ubuntu are both Debian offshoots.

 

 

edit, add: This article by Richard Stallman is very near the philosophy of Linux as far as I can tell. At least it should be in my opinion.

Edited by r356c

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Sarge

I'll keep the router option in mind - not a bad idea to boot off other drives for testing different OS systems and storage, besides, routers are faster anyway. I need to learn how to store a BIOS repair disk, prefer it's kept as an option if the HDD takes a dump and I have to reload. One issue with OEM builds is their specific drivers, which always include bloatware - which I'd like the option to load without it. I can keep the current HDD intact for warranty, for now, seems nothing ever fails until the warranty expires anyway. The SSD in the old Lattitude was nice, very fast too. I did learn from the Professor and others that when they are running at much over 50% of capacity it starts to slowly damage them from moving blocks around, eventually leading to failures and errors. I have an adapter coming to hook up to that old SSD and hopefully be able to copy off the document files that are on it - no way I can find all that stuff again. If I can recover that stuff - it's going right onto a Milleniata 25GB M-disk along with a pdf reader. 

 

I love the ideal of how Linux was developed, not being based on money, but based on a community that supports clean and unpolluted computing. No one looking over your shoulder and spying - Win10 is solely driven with that in mind. I agree with Mr. Stallman's article, having software and drivers for hardware with a copyrighted base defeats the whole purpose of sharing an open and free environment. As of late - we're learning the consequences from having too much control over the end user, their information/profile and how that is used for a means of not only marketing and money - but for highly damaging purposes. Anything that comes with a legal agreement should be taken as "we own you now" to the end user - I totally disagree with that, and it needs to stop.

 

Sarge

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