Sony Sony DRU-810A DVD burner will not finish burning?

[Heretik]

I finally made the massive upgrade from CD to DVD, in hopes of backing up all of the files on my portable hard drive. I always worry about these because whenever my system crashes, I have to restart my computer by cutting the power instead of a proper shutdown - which I hear destroys your hard drive - internal, or external. Also, there has been evidence of this in the music files that I store on my hard drive.

The problem that I am having is that when I burn a Maxwell DVD+R at 8x (the highest speed I have available) at some point during the burning, the read buffer drops to 1%, and it stops burning completely. I left a disk at 4%, and I came back 2 hours later, and it was still at 4%. However, after restarting my computer (of course I had to cut the power without a proper shutdown, which doesn't do my hard drive any favours), I was able to write the disk with 100% buffer for the entire time - no problems. Okay, inspired by the success, I figured that it would be cool to try another disk. Nope this one got about 46% of the way through at 100% read buffer, and then cut to 1% again. There are no drivers that I have been able to find to date, and I really don't know what to do.

Thank you for your help

[seans]

1. Power loss of any kind does not "destroy" the harddrive persay however it does cause a "head crash" this being the read/write head skidding across the surface of the harddisk there is a 1/1000000000000 chance that the head crash will mess up your data. So in other words, don't worry about it, the odds are in your favor.

2. Several studies has pointed out in the last year that recordable optical media does not have a long shelf life. For archival backups magentic media is the best. A harddrive or some form of tape. I suggest one of the many NAS devices aimed at the home market for "nearline" backup.

3. Your real question: I'm betting that you are trying to backup your data to DVD from the protable drive. I'm also betting it's USB or USB2 and this is your problem. Copy the files you want to backup to your internal harddrive and burn it from there, delete the files once you're checked the burned disk out to make sure it's good.

[Heretik]

seans - thank you so much

First of all, that first comment eliminates sooo much paranoia I have everytime I need to shutdown the computer like that.

Second of all, I don't have enough to afford anything designed for storage right now - nothing really except for DVDs anyways - another hard drive would be easiest, but it's out of the question right now. However, I will burn DVDs to last me the 4 or 5 years that I'm in school, then maybe burn them again or something to give myself another 5 years or so. Hopefully by then I will have a steady career - or even before that I have some spare cash to blow - but I am going to need what I've got to upgrade my computer for 3D animation that is starting up next year.

And lastly- that never actually occurred to me. I just figured that since I could burn CDs at like 48x off the hard drive without problems, I would be able to Burn DVDs. I guess I could also try reducing the speed.

Thank you very much!