Actually they can.

Shelf life of a high quality properly stored disc should be at least 25 years, some say as high as 50 or more. Sunlight, high heat, humidity can all kill a disc pretty quick.

I would not trust bargain bin media past 5-10.

Don't use a Sharpie as it can degrade the dye.

Paper labels are also questionable and can cause an unbalanced disc that can wreck your drive.

I only use name brand these days.

Bought a couple of sleeves of "a good deal" once. Half of them were coasters right out of the box.

The high failure rate made them cost as much as name brand.

Archive material-What is the best? Caution-PHD logic applied. Updated Sept. 2007

http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/30/how-to-choose-cddvd-archival-media

John_AZ

Depends on price and features, my wife and I have several machines, Linux, Mac (rules) and Bill's, she has a lot of video project and pictures and I just want backups of everything. I went with a Linksys NAS (resell) because of the features and price. 1 TB of raid 5 storage, accessible from all systems, cat's pajamas.

Dunno if you can get them over there, but I use a Freecom Data Tank: two 400gb RAID drives in an aluminium enclosure that can run as one drive, as two separate drives or, as I run them, like one drive mirroring the other, so always backed up. Small and cheaper than you think. Brilliant bit of kit. I use Firewire 800 to talk to it, much faster than USB.

http://www.freecom.com/objects/00009528.jpg

Ebay has a bunch. I ordered a Seagate 320Gb ext. drive with a universal USB case. When it arrived, it contained instead a Maxtor drive (now owned by Seagate). Maxtor drives are warranted for 3 years versus 5 for Seagate. I eventually got what I paid for. About $120.00. You could do cheaper buying the bare ext. case and a bare drive and assembling it yourself. YMMV. Yes, drive prices will drop further, but I wonder about the build quality. Have a backup plan for your ext. backup drive.

Sherwood

I've also got a 500GB WD MyBook and I've been able to back up my old laptop stuff on it which was a fair amount of stuff, and I've not had any problems with it at all, it's quiet, turns itself to standby when not being used for awhile (it's still plugged into the laptop) and has never overheated or given me any reason to doubt its ability.

Good luck with whatever you decide! SmileWavy

Above noted.

What I'm looking for is RAID1 like capabilities for redundancy in 500GB level storage, but also packaging like the Maxtor "One Touch" system, which can recover your disc/settings, current programs from a crash and has encryption. Anything come as a package deal, or do I have to set it up one thing at a time?

I have two externals. One usb 2.0 fujitsu 2.5 drive at 120gig that (5400 rpm) that is two years old and travels with me and my laptop everywhere I go. It still works fine and is faster than my accomodata 3.5" external which is also usb 2.0 but spins at 7200 rpm and requires power.

Think about whether you will want to use this external drive when you dont have access to power. I find I use my 2.5 for everything because its so convienent (no power to hookup) then backup to my 3.5" drive. Take what others here have advised about quality - I have not had any problems here. Other things being equal cost per gig of storage is an OK measure. However, it may be more (or less) convienent to have two smaller drives than one larger one. Two drives allows each laptop one drive attached so you dont have to bother with sharing or moving the thing around.

You both have laptops so if they move around alot, you will have to move the drives too or at least unhook them. Some have suggested raid for redundancy. This is good but it comes at a cost. The advantage of a package like network attached storage (NAS) is that you can hook them up to your network and that way they are not attached to either laptop but available to both...and they usually come with Raid options.

On the other hand, for the cost of stuff like some NAS options and the Freecom Data Tank, you could buy a new desktop PC with as much storage and configure raid 1 (you need two drives) or raid 5 (requires at least 3 drives). This route means more setup and configuration than the Freecom Data Tank but then you have another computer. You would need to share the drives too.

Ive had a 300GB Seagate for about 3 years...very reliable and has never failed. Im going to pick up another one here soon.

I think Butzis old company Porsche Design actually has an external hard drive too...i saw it at Best Buy.

I prefer Western digital hard drives. Right now, I have 3TB of hard drive storage at home and almost all of the drives are Western Digital.

I got a WD 500 G...Costco wise...and very satisfied with...For 125 $.

What are you storing at home where you need 3 TB?

Wait! I don't want to know.....

WD 500g external .... died within 6 months.

Any hard drive is going to fail just a matter of when. I use one for a back up, but want something to copy onto like a CD. Is there anything that lasts longer than the 25 year life of a CD and is not overly expensive and easy to copy to?

Not easy to copy to, but I hear stone tablets last like a billion years if you keep them out of the wind blown sand. :)

I bought a couple 500GB Seagate FreeAgent externals from Best Buy for $99 ea when they were on sale a year ago. They are still working fine, but there have been issues reported pertaining to overheating. Being as I never turn my computer off, I may remove the outer shells for better air circulation. Of course that voids the warranty....

I have two WD My Book 'Premium Edition' drives, one is 500 Gb, the other is 1Tb. Both work perfectly. (2 years-old and 1 year-old) I would recomend them.

I have seen three of the My Book 'Essential Edition' 500 Gb drives fail right out of the box. I would avoid them.

Anybody with Maxtor One Touch experience?

Funky form factor. Makes em impossible to stack.

I prefer my cases to be square and low. Don't understand all the fanciness in case design these days. Looks cool but limits functionality.

Please explain.

The surface is covered in a lacquer.

Some Sharpies, not singling out Sharpie, I really mean any marker, are water based, some alcohol based.

The alcohol based ones can eat through the lacquer damaging the media. So can some of the adhesive on paper labels.

Personally I use Sharpies all the time but really only on stuff that will only be needed for a short period of time.

I think it's more of an issue with cheap media.

Some discs are covered in a white surface that's there to write on. Those are not an issue.