Why buy a CD-Player?

[cpt_paranoia]

I would call it a failure.

Oh, they fail all right; no dispute there. All HDDs fails, motherboards fail (seems the network interface is a regular failure on the MyCloud).

I spent rather too much time on the MyCloud forum, providing free customer support (until the mods pissed me off once too often). And data recovery from broken devices was a fairly common theme. I'd say the majority of people who removed the HDD and stuck it on a linux box, or used an extfs driver were able to recover the data.

I'm no advocate of either sort of device, and no WD apologist; I got both of my devices cheaper than the WD Red drives they contain. And my backup scheme is adequate for my needs, as explained above. I don't need RAID. I do need a backup (as does anyone with data on an HDD they don't want to lose).

 

[restorer-john]

...A hard drive or SSD is just as much "physical" as a piece of shiny plastic...

Well not quite. SSDs store data as an electrical charge on floating gate MOSFETs. Those electrons are 'trapped', but gradually escape in the absence of power/usage. The time to data loss and corruption is measured in years, not decades. People won't be digging up SSDs and SD cards and extracting anything useful off them.

Why spin another drive 24/7 rather than having it sit offline and vastly increase its functional life? Yes, when you add content, you'll need to spend a couple minutes for an incremental backup.

Totally agree with this. I mothballed my 5 bay NAS with RAID as it simply ran 24/7 spinning 5 drives, running two fans and eating up a whole lot of electricity. Replaced it with two smaller single HDD NASs, one offline the other online. Once every few months I synchronize them. My data is all photos, stored movies and technical information, no music.

 

[heyraz]

I have roughly 6Tb stored on my NAS. It holds my music, videos, documents and pictures which is a little tough to duplicate onto portable drives. Slow to transfer and and expensive too. If my data was absolutely critical, I would build another box (Freenas), store it someplace else and back up my data to another location too.

As a matter of fact, my son in law told me that's another "RAID" scheme. Many NAS boxes in different locations able to reconstruct the full data set if one location gets destroyed (fire/theft).

So in my personal box I have four drives. If I lose one drive, the other three can reconstruct the data when the faulty drive is replaced.
Having four similar NAS boxes in four locations can do the same thing. One location goes down (fire/theft) and the data can be reconstructed on the other three.

Problems and solutions.

 

[Keldog]

Go to your local GW. Find a CD player for under $15. In the store, I like to test it by grabbing a random CD and plugging it in. If the counter moves, you know it's playing. Tap on the case from all sides and pick it up and give it a gentle shake to emulate the vibration of something bumping the stand it's on or jarring the floor. If the counter jumps, it's no good. No jump, should be fine. I picked up a nice Denon 5 disc changer for under $20 and it works flawlessly and integrates into my living room system just fine. Also found a Pioneer CD recorder for $10 at an antique shop for $10. Not to mention a sealed in the box Technics CD recorder for $14.99 at SA.

Cds are easy to find at GW, too. $2 each and half price on some days. I've ripped hundreds to my computer converting to MP3 and putting them on my phone. I have over 4,000 songs I can carry in my pocket.

Basically, you really don't need anything fancy and expensive to enjoy your music.

 

[scoloheros]

To the OP, I personally wouldn't spend a lot of money on a 'new' cd player. I do like cd players though, they may turn out to be a novelty from the past like the cassette player but still have the musical quality of digital we have today. So imo, kind of like the best of both worlds in the respect. I like the stand-alone idea with cd players also, I don't like the idea of depending on streaming. I have many cd players, I have the Pioneer PD-M6 which I read was the first commercially available CD changer player, I thought that was kind of cool. I have a few Sony ES series players, NAD, Technics, Denon and some others. I'm gathering retirement projects, I think ahead! If I go early I feel sorry for the people that have to clean up this place.

 

[E-Stat]

People won't be digging up SSDs and SD cards and extracting anything useful off them.

Nor will anyone be reading pits via optical drives on "dug up" plastic circles.