Stilly -

My DVD burner is "unreliable" on +R disks, and they're the only ones available in bulk - that I've seen. The unsettled format standards, in my opinion, make DVD unsuitable for archiving, and recovery from DVD is painfully slow regardless of the format. Reports on stability, especially for the bulk disks, have also been rather mixed, which is another reason I'm reluctant to consider DVD for much archiving.

I generally buy only very small quantities, and the last that I bought were nearly $7 per disk. I don't consider them the best way to go, so I haven't looked for any recently. The situation may have changed.

For my use, a 300 GB drive is overkill. The "sweet spot" for bits per buck is closer to the 160 GB to 180 GB size in my area, and it's less trouble doing the periodic cleanups and defrags with smaller drives. As mentioned before, a desktop hard drive in an "external USB case" makes a lot of sense to me, since you can swap the drives to other uses. It's also very handy to have one of the cases in case of a hard drive failure or other need for a swap in your machine, since you can mirror what's left on the old drive without fighting to get the new one on the inside (which usually means temporarily removing another drive).

If and when reasonably priced real RAID systems become a bit easier to get into, I'd perhaps consider 300 GB there, but of course that would be a major investment even at "reasonable." By the time I get to that, the 1 TB drives will be common(?).

Recent "expert opinion" has begun to move toward "server storage" (i.e. on redundant hard drives) as the most reliable and cost-effective method of archiving. I'm not fully convinced - yet - but they're making very good sense.

John