That's a real purty picture you paint there regarding "magnetics" (I just call them "hard drives", but I don't expect my term to really catch on with the general public).
Of course you're omitting a few things. First of all portabality... sure you can use external "magnetics", but if they are used ultra-portably you dramatically increase the second problem, drive failures. It might take an extra 30 seconds to verify a burned disc, but then as long as you don't throw it around casually you know it'll read, it's built to be portable. On the other hand, with "magnetics" you know it has your data, but once the drive fails you're out of luck (or out of tons of money to hopefully recover the data). Plus you've got the huge differential of data lost between a 4 GB DVD and a 500GB "magnetic" (and as we've seen, as optical discs increase capacity, so will HDDs).
Ultimately neither one is a perfect solution, so I have HDDs with instant access to all my data, but I also have DVD backups in case the HDDs fail. Championing one format while claiming the other is useless is short sighted and foolish. Advances in both technologies, side by side, means better options for the consumer...
“Getting too close completely blurred what we saw to the point of incomprehension, but again, this shows a whole heap of potential that's fascinating to us.”
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That's a real purty picture you paint there regarding "magnetics" (I just call them "hard drives", but I don't expect my term to really catch on with the general public).
Of course you're omitting a few things. First of all portabality... sure you can use external "magnetics", but if they are used ultra-portably you dramatically increase the second problem, drive failures. It might take an extra 30 seconds to verify a burned disc, but then as long as you don't throw it around casually you know it'll read, it's built to be portable. On the other hand, with "magnetics" you know it has your data, but once the drive fails you're out of luck (or out of tons of money to hopefully recover the data). Plus you've got the huge differential of data lost between a 4 GB DVD and a 500GB "magnetic" (and as we've seen, as optical discs increase capacity, so will HDDs).
Ultimately neither one is a perfect solution, so I have HDDs with instant access to all my data, but I also have DVD backups in case the HDDs fail. Championing one format while claiming the other is useless is short sighted and foolish. Advances in both technologies, side by side, means better options for the consumer...