So let me pose you a question … you can buy 100 DVD’s for about $30, or you can buy a 500 GB hard drive for about $60 to $65 … which one would you pick? In my mind, the decision is quickly changing over to using the hard drive.

The answer is simple … it comes from both a sense of space and time. I’ve always been an optical media addict, for a good 10 years now, and that means saving anything I find to a CD, or DVD, or something that’s fairly static. However, this doesn’t come without its own cost … time. Even at 16x speeds, it takes five minutes to burn a full DVD and maybe another five minutes to get that disc ready and organize stuff.  So, six discs an hour … if you value your time at minimum wage, that’s $1 a disc!

So after about 30-50 discs, your possible return on investment over having a drive that holds 100 DVD’s worth of stuff and is dynamic and not “stuck” in place suddenly sounds plausibly good.  You would also lose other possible negatives of disc media, like space lost when you can’t fill a disc, or sometimes questionable compatibility from drive to drive.

So, these now suddenly cheap hard drives, under 15 cents a GB, and quickly approaching a dime … are they the answer to everything? There is an argument to say no too. Optical media does have a nice convenience factor, and will always have a use when sharing media with friends, and when you need some space quick, a 4.7 GB disk beats waiting for a huge hard drive to show up. No USB ports needed, no extra cabling to haul with you. Organizing will also cost time here, so it would be unrealistic to think that the preparation time you assume would be saved with every disc is fully collected back.

But with all that in mind, I can see myself picking up one of these drives soon and testing out the theory of whether I do save the kind of time I think I could with going with hard drives. External drives are down to $70 from places like eCost.com (and even $90 from local sources), internal drives are sometimes cheaper than that from Geeks.com and Newegg.com … and if it seems unrealiztic to think I’d want to carry a 3.5″ hard drive enclosure on the road with me (which is a fair argument), dynamic flash media and portable hard drives are dramatically less than what they were (8GB Flash Drives for $25, 120GB portable drives for $60), so data portability is not a huge thing, and that doesn’t even include the cloud storage world!

So, what do you think? Are you compelled to give up on optical and go with hard drives more and more?