What's the easiest way to transfer.....

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

....2,500+ songs from ones hard drive to disk for safe keeping? I don't have a zip drive...and the older blank floppy discs that I have are about 2 mb which hold next to nothing. Are there higher density floppy discs -- say 400-500MB -- that I can use rather than have to mess around with picking up an IOMEGA 1 gig JAZZ drive or so?

[Claude]

So that would be ca 10GB of data?

Don't you have a CD burner? This would be the cheapest and the most compatible way to store the files (readable on every PC). You would even be able to play the MP3s on those data CDs (700MB) directly in a DVD player.

Iomega storage (ZIP, JAZ or whatever) is much more expensive per MB. ZIP discs are small (100MB and 250MB), JAZ is not manufactured anymore.

Another alternative is an external hard drive, but you would need a USB2.0 or firewire connection, as USB 1.1 connections (that most older PCs have) are much too slow.

Edited September 21, 2003 by Claude

[vibes]

Weizen, I'd look into a DVD burner. I just backed up mp3's I made from Mosaics to a DVD-RW, and I got 4.7GB on one DVD. If you do decide to go this route, look for a drive that has DVD +-R/RW capabilities, so that you won't have to worry about DVD formats or the like (there's no one "accepted" standard yet).

I use an external firewire hard drive and also find it a very helpful tool to have around. It's worth looking into as well.

There are lots of Best Buy stores in Northern VA, and any of them would be able to help you with this.

[Jim Alfredson]

You can get a CD burner for your computer for around $50 these days and discs are so cheap it's laughable.

[Shrdlu]

Yeah, go for a CD burner inside the PC - or, the DVD drive if funds permit.

I would strongly recommend an LG burner. We've had one for several years, and it's never given a minute's trouble. And you don't get faulty end-of-file markers like you do with those horrible Harmon-Kardon stand-alone burners.

We also had a read-only Creative Labs CD drive, and it was a piece of junk. It's gone now, as it just up and died. Don't buy one of their burners.

[Jim Alfredson]

I agree. Creative Labs are junk. I would go with either Plextor (the best drives made), Sony (middle-ground) or Lite-On (cheap, but dependable).

[RDK]

Enjoying emusic, huh?

Since I don't care to listen to the stuff I download on my computer speakers, I tend to burn most of my emusic stuff to CDRs so I can listen anywhere. But if you're just getting started and only want to archive these then I'd recommend getting a DVD burner and save them as mp3s. You can probably get around 50 albums worth of music on each DVD-R.

[Jim Dye]

Definitely get a DVD burner if you can, but a CD burner is a cheap and convenient way to go.

Go to newegg.com and pick up one of these for only 40 bucks.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?...rtby=14&order=1

It's cheap, it's reliable and easy. Blank CDs are so cheap these days.