Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 6/1/2009, 1:39 PM
> Any thoughts on using Blu-Ray discs for archiving projects?

Way too expensive is my first thought. At $10 for a 25GB disc that's $0.40/GB while $89 will get you a 1TB hard disc which only costs $0.09/GB. So at 40 cents vs 9 cents, Blu-ray has a long way to go to be a viable archive medium for projects.

~jr
Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/1/2009, 2:32 PM
my biggest concern is HD failure - even new drives are prone to it.

Cliff Etzel
Videographer : Producer : Web Designer
bluprojekt
blink3times wrote on 6/1/2009, 2:40 PM
"At $10 for a 25GB disc that's $0.40/GB"

You can get them as low as $2.99 a disk now (I don't know if that was some kind of blow out deal, but last time I saw, it was at Newegg)
John_Cline wrote on 6/1/2009, 5:06 PM
Personally, I would be more concerned about optical disc failure than hard drive failure.

Current hard drives are pretty robust, particulary with the fluid dynamic bearings. Old drives with conventional ball bearings and lubricant would seize if not powered up regularly. Although a quick twist of the drive in your hand would usually free up the platters.

A typical project for me is in the 300-500 gigabyte range, so archiving to Blu-ray is impractical for cost and speed reasons. It takes at least 15 minutes to restore a single, full Blu-ray disc but I can just pop a hard drive into a dock and use the data immediately. That said, I sure hope that hard drives last a long time, I've got close to 100 hard drives with archived material on them. A few of these drives are at least eight years old. So far, so good.
john-beale wrote on 6/1/2009, 6:15 PM
I know it's too early to know, but I'm curious about how the burned blu-ray discs (BD-R) will hold up over time. My limited understanding is they have somewhat different construction from DVD-R, but with about 5x more data in the same space, it seems that the individual bits would be that much more vulnerable to degradation.

For some time there have been DVD drives that would report PI/PO error rates, with software like KProbe and Nero CD/DVD-Speed, so you could get a handle on how your data was holding up (or not), and compare different media for best compatibility on your drive.

As far as I know, there are no Blu-Ray players that report similar information. They just show a basic good/no good flag for data regions. You can't tell how close your "good" data is to the digital cliff edge of "no good".
Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/1/2009, 6:41 PM
Thanks to JR and John Cline for your input on HD's being a safe and practical archiving medium.

Cliff Etzel
Videographer : Producer : Web Designer
bluprojekt
farss wrote on 6/1/2009, 8:47 PM
Interesting question as I had a similar discussion with a gent from one of our larger IT suppliers. The BIG mistake BD made was ignoring the IT market.
His spin was that DVD took off because they was good reason to offer PCs with burners in them even though the media was relatively expensive, demand saw prices plummet to where today good quality DVDs are a viable medium for archiving data.
The BD camp has kind of missed this opportunity, it was too focused on just movies and STB players.

Bob.
wjsd wrote on 6/2/2009, 5:12 AM
Could be true that BD ignored the IT market, but it's even more true that IT ignored BD. Like most everybody else, IT sat on the sidelines waiting to see who would win the battle between BD and HD DVD. So BD was fighting for its life and had to focus on consumer market.

Now that BD won that war, it can focus on a new battle with DVD.