@voltronic I have an older machine and would probably need a PCIe adapter that supports this SSD. Any experience doing that?

@mikeflstfi
I've never done that myself, but there are lots of adapters made for this, and on-board m.2 NVMe are PCIe already so it should work the same.

The only snag you might possibly hit would be BIOS support, although booting from Ann external controller is a really old thing. I'd be sure to upgrade to the latest version before doing this.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/nvme-pci-e-adapter-expansion-card.2578963/

https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/

@Vanitas
Not really that big a project, especially once you're set up for it.

@mcfate
Solid choice. Pioneer make excellent disc drives.

The most important thing is to use quality HTL media from the above list. Fewer companies make them nowadays. LTH discs are cheaper to manufacture, but perform far worse in long-term reliability tests. You can't even trust all the the old top brands like Taiyo Yuden who have since moved to the cheaper processing plants in China.

@voltronic

Luckily, most of the content is actually pretty static, so if I get it onto optical discs, I can kind of stop worrying about the rotating media it was on.

@mcfate
Yes, but I'm saying you should also care about the long-term stability of the optical media, and there's quite a bit of variance there.

I'm happy to say I have CD-R backups over 20 years old that still read perfectly.

The main reason I promote optical backups is they are much more likely to work in some future system years from now than will a hard drive, which might have an obsolete interface by then, and is much more sensitive to shock and environmental factors.

@voltronic @mcfate Many years ago, in the 1990s, I read an article in Scientific American about the problems of long-term data storage. Long-term, as in archaeological units of time. Issues include: (1) media preservation, (2) hardware to read the media, and (3) software to decode the bits. The author recommended updating data to newer media over time to intentionally preserve it. At the time, he estimated 10 reliable years for CDs. They're lasting longer than 10 years, we now know.

@paxterrarum @voltronic

Yeah, I remember that article.

Also relevant, the "Long Now Foundation".

@mcfate @voltronic What's weird is I can remember that article in such detail I can outline it, but I can't remember why I went into the kitchen...

@paxterrarum @voltronic

Memory's a funny thing. At least you don't have to tattoo stuff on your arms, like the guy in Memento.

@mcfate @paxterrarum @voltronic

Etched in microfiche on titanium ribbon is really the only way to go for serious long-term storage.

All you need to read it is optics.

Those will never change. 😐

@Dobo @mcfate @voltronic There ya go, gettin' all practical!

@paxterrarum @mcfate @voltronic

Hey, you want permanent or you want practical? 😜

@Dobo @paxterrarum @voltronic

I'm a Buddhist, there's no such thing as "permanent".

@mcfate @paxterrarum @voltronic

I'm a fan of Brian Eno: don't try to recreate your old data, create new, better data.

@paxterrarum @mcfate @voltronic

FTR, my first novel in digital form is stored on 8-inch hard sectored floppy disks that I still have kicking around here somewhere. There's no way in hell I can recover that.

Luckily I also have paper copies, and scanned one in using OCR.

@ceerg
It didn't take that long either, except for my music files which are nearly 500 GB.

50 GB BD-R discs are expensive, so I don't mind making a lot of 25 GB ones.

One tip I forgot to add to the above:

You will have to change the filesystem in your disc burning software to UDF if you have files larger than 4 GB. Many burning apps default to Joliet, which has that file size limit.

https://cdburnerxp.se/help/Appendices/filesystem