I'm lucky in some respects that almost all the pix & sissy pix that I had digitized survived the fire. With bragging about thousands of sissy pix, people think I have all sorts of pix of sissies dressing up.
But being a crossdresser, most of the images are of outfits not sissies. The ones where if they're worn by anyone, they're usually girls. About 9 years ago a Seagate drive that came with a computer failed, & I lost everything on it. But because I backed up a lot onto DVDs at the time, I only lost some of what I accumulated over a little more than a year, & many of them weren't sissy pix anyway.
For instance, all my 50th birthday party pix were lost because they weren't backed up yet. It was special for my 50th, & a pretty big event, with some very touching moment photographed. Some of the people there aren't even alive anymore. It a shame I didn't back them up. Almost all the DVDs & hard drives survived the fire.
Since then, it's only Western digital drives for me. Even when they start to wear down after years of constant use, I can still get my data off of them & use them if I have to.
I have a 12 year old 250bg WD USB drive that got accidentally dropped. Since then it may take several tries to write data on it & it writes slower now, but it still reads the data fine on the first try.
The WD drives in my PC & laptop are 10 y/o too. They read & write a bit slower now. I have to get new drives for them soon. A drive will get bad clusters here & there after just a year or so. A good drive & it's electronics will write instructions before the bad cluster to skip over it. A bad cluster of a few KB here & there skipped won't be noticeable on a drive with many GB on it. But when the drive gets old & has quite a few bad clusters, it takes more time to read the instructions to skip those clusters.
Also when drive get old, the motor, & drive bearings get wear out. This causes vibration at high speeds, which can cause read & write errors. A good drive will sense this & try to read or write at a slower speed, until it finds a speed that still works.
I got a few USB drives now. All of them I got used, broken, defective, or worn. Most USB hard drives have 2.5" laptop drives in them. So I carefully cracked open my 250gb WD USB drive, slid out the laptop drive, & slide in the defective drives in the case. Using the WD electronics, & WD drivers, I was able to get them all running fine... at reduced write speeds.
So I leave the old WD USB case open, & slide the drives in & out of it as needed. 3, 1TB drives read at full speed, but only write at USB 1 speeds. It tries to start writing at full speed, but as soon as the WD electronics & drivers discovers it can't do that reliably, it slows it down enough so it works. So all the fuss was worth it for an extra 3TB of storage space. A 4.7gb DVD can only use about 4.5gb most of the time. So 3TB of drives can hold 667 DVDs.
Of course DVDs & blu-ray is obsolete as most people save their TV & movies in mp4 or MKV format these days. You can fit 4-6 HDTV movies in mp4 or MKV on a single 4.7gb DVD.
There's also a 500gb laptop drive I got going too. But it is only reliable as my old 250gb one. It may take several tries to get it to write a file if it's a large one. So I use them to save TV & radio shows I want to save for a short time, but not to keep permanently.
The best reliable, longest lasting drives are Western Digital. It's not just that the mechanism is built better, but the design of the electronics & drivers make them more reliable too. Granted, if you drop one, or it was banged around during shipping, it might be bad. But they even take more abuse than others too.
All the hype is solid state drives now. Because of their high read/write speed, they can really boost performance. The problem is they have been know to fail or mysteriously loose data. Static charges, & power surges wreak havoc on them too. So I wouldn't use them to save crucial data that can't be lost. Also the life expectancy of them is only 2-4 years... and when they fail, you loose everything. A good mechanical drive can last 10-20 years.
A 7200rpm mechanical drive with a decent sized buffer built in, is just as fast as most of the affordable solid state drives on the market. a 10,000rpm mechanical drive with a good buffer is faster than any solid state drive.
And speed is relative to how fast your computer is actually capable of sending data in & out of the drive. It makes no sense to get a drive or other components faster than what the machine can process. Why spend thousands on tires capable of handling 300mph if your car can't go much over 100mph?
SSDs for fast gaming, multitasking, & media processing (converting/editing etc) with low power consumption on a new fast multi-core computer? Yes!
For reliably processing, saving, archiving data & many years of use? No. It's not ready for that yet.
Topic: Vintage girls clothing (gallery) (Read 72988 times)
