Burner

My hard drive has finally filled up and I was unwilling to delete the House episodes I've pirated as I believe I'll want to watch them again, so I've bought a DVD burner. A dirt-cheap Sony DW-Q30A (actually a LiteON SHW-1635S) was what the local store had on hand, and the review said it's ok. A switch to 80 ribbon cable, firmware flash and setting the burn speed to x4 managed to get it to consistently write successfully on cheap x8 media, as long as I don't do anything IO intensive while it chugs away. My hard drives are struggling with the demand for consistent high speed reads, especially as the files got heavily fragmented on an almost-full disk. I have to say two seasons on four disks is a welcome change from burning a whole cake, both time and space-wise. I'm a bit worried about the media's longevity so I'll probably go and pick up some good archival quality media, but what I have should be enough to relieve storage pressure.

With the free space, I'm pirating 24.