[mythtv-users] Anyone archiving to Blu-Ray Disks?

[Raymond Wagner]

On 7/8/2010 09:07, John Drescher wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 8:58 AM, Brian Wood<beww at beww.org>  wrote:
>    
>> On Wednesday, July 07, 2010 10:28:38 pm Nick Rout wrote:
>>      
>>> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 3:54 PM, John Drescher<drescherjm at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>        
>>>>> Maybe 1st calculate the cost of storage per GB and compare that to
>>>>> hard-disk.
>>>>>            
>>>> That is a big problem. 2TB hard drives can be had for $110 now which
>>>> is way way cheaper per GB than blue ray will be for a long long time.
>>>>          
> After posting I saw a couple of $3 BD-R disks on newegg. They have a
> caution about what drives support them but this may reduce the cost.
>    

That's still twice the cost of a hard drive, in addition to requiring a 
burner.  You still have to take into account hidden costs, like your 
personal time.

Say you buy a pair of 2TB drives to archive to, mirrored, to even the 
cost of of those cheap disks.  With the hard drives, you plug both in, 
drag in 2TB of files, and leave.  That's maybe 10 minutes to set up, and 
most of a day copying, during which you can do whatever else you want.

Now consider burning that to BD-Rs.  A 10xCAV drive is probably going to 
take about 12 minutes to burn, or 15 including lead in/out.  Add in a 
couple minutes per disk to swap them, and set up the files to burn.  
You're looking at a full 24 hours of your time to burn all that data, 
compared to maybe 10 minutes using a hard drive backup, and that's not 
giving any form of redundancy.  I've not used BD-Rs, but I know from 
experience that CD-Rs and DVD-Rs die over time.  Then remember that if 
you ever wish to recover off those drives, you're looking at much the 
same situation in reverse.

The only reason I could see wanting to archive to BR is if you 
specifically wanted it in a format playable on a BR player.  With media 
players that can use hard drives, usb drives, and flash cards, that is 
rapidly becoming unnecessary.