[nirofo]

As I said earlier, I receive many computer systems for repair that have some form of hard drive fault, I would say it's probably as high as 90%. The majority of these are caused by hard drive crashes which occasionally can be repaired, but more often than not will lead to further problems in the not to distant future, the rest are catastophic hard drive failures! Usually, the best and safest remedy means a new replacement hard drive and a complete system re-boot. In some cases the data is recoverable from the old hard drive without too much effort or expense, in others the monetry cost of data recovery is outwith the majority of general PC users. Bottom line, for fast, easy storage that you could lose catastrophically at any time, go for large hard drive storage (internal or external). For long term safe storage, albeit with slightly more involved file saving methods, go for DVD-R. The longevity of DVD-R disks is supposed to be in the order of 25 years, providing you still have the PC's and drives to use them. I'm not sure what the storage longevity of say a 200Gb hard drive is drive is, (it's magnetic media), and you still need a PC to run it even after 25 years. Price of 40 x 5Gb DVD-R disksm (200Gb) approx £20, price of one 200Gb hard drive, (40x5Gb DVD-R disks) approx £70. Oh yes, and I can watch films on a DVD player-recorder.

nirofo.