News - Pioneer bringing BDXL burners to the UK

[HEXUS]

128GB quad-layer Blu-ray burner will be available in the new year.

Read more.

[miniyazz]

Just.. why? More robust than conventional storage methods? Because the convenience and cost sure won't be there.

[b0redom]

Because the amount of media needed to backup massive arrays of data will reduce again.

[neonplanet40]

I cant say I know many people that burn normal blu-rays never mind these new ones The media is just too expensive and because of this people are sticking with dvd's.

Nice to see them releasing it though

[b0redom]

Except a few years ago it was the same with dvds and cds, and before that with cds and floppies......

[neonplanet40]

Exactly so wait until they are cheap then everyone will buy them! Until then things like the above wont be bought by your average joe.

[miniyazz]

I remember backing things up onto cd/dvd, back in the day. However - back then, it was by far the cheapest way to do it. A 500GB external HDD would cost upwards of £100, yet DVDs could be bought for <20p/disc. Now, one of those BDXL discs is going to cost, what, £25? A quick Google suggests a 25GB disc costs >£2, yet a 1.5TB drive is ~£50. So.. it would cost ~£120 to back up 1.5TB on current blu-rays, excluding the need for a blu-ray reader/writer, but only £100 to back up 1.5TB twice onto HDDs, allowing you to have onsite and offsite backup, and far greater convenience, never mind the initial outlay for a blu-ray writer.

If/when they do become cheaper there may be a market, I don't know. It just seems like they've had a long time to come down in price already, and they haven't dropped to anywhere near economical viability for anything over a few hundred GBs. And in the meantime, HDD costs are plummeting.

[jim]

HDDs are more likely to fail, that's the problem.

[neonplanet40]

Or you can drop the disk and scratch it and then its useless.

[Max Tractor]

The time I spent backing up to cd/dvd, 2 copies a user and a master, always bought verbatims it began to border on the ridiculous, drive for reading, nec for-/benq for +, a drive for error pie/pif, the time spent looking for the right verbatims, must be 3 years since I last used any of them. I back up to my server, and back up to an external, 2 copies. Mainstream is what would bring the price of this media down, I just cant see these taking off, external is so cheap now, and what with cloud, current online storage such as sugarsync etc.

[jim]

Or you can drop the disk and scratch it and then its useless.

Well, you could drop a hard disk and it wouln't work any more. That's not really a meaningful argument.

The point is, a carefully stored optical disc on a shelf is extremely resilient.

A carefully stored hard drive on a shelf can easily come back 2 years later with corruption.

[badass]

HDDs are more likely to fail, that's the problem.

What's the archive lifetime of this BDXL media?
In all likelihood the 2 HDD's are probably significantly less likely to both fail.
Optical media has a habit of being unreadable after 5 years of near perfect storage.

[kingpotnoodle]

Well, you could drop a hard disk and it wouln't work any more. That's not really a meaningful argument.

The point is, a carefully stored optical disc on a shelf is extremely resilient.

A carefully stored hard drive on a shelf can easily come back 2 years later with corruption.

Mag tape is also stable, and comes in hundreds of GB capacities... but it's costly, slow and temperamental.
Hard disks are quick, cheap but fragile.
Optical is stable, but quite costly and lacks capacity.
Online backup (maybe double duplicated to 2 locations) is excellent, but needs a fat pipe and can get costly for large data volumes.

Pick your poison...

[Saracen]

What's the archive lifetime of this BDXL media?
In all likelihood the 2 HDD's are probably significantly less likely to both fail.
Optical media has a habit of being unreadable after 5 years of near perfect storage.

That depends on the type of optical media. There's a vast array, including (but not limited to) DVD-R, DVD-RAM and MO. That assertion might be true for DVD-R, especially for the cheaper types, but in my experience, not for MO, DVD-RAM, etc.

DVD-R is far less reliable for long-term data storage than DVD-RAM, let alone MO, but the more resilient types have archival lives rated at between 30 years and 50 years. There are a number of reasons for this, ranging from the way data is written to the disc (such as a laser heating the disc to beyond the Curie point before magnetically changing the state of the disc), to physical shells protecting the discs (as all the DVD-RAM and MO discs I still use have, though you can get 'bare' DVD-RAM discs, to hardware data verification on write, to sector-based systems rather than the old spiral-sequential method, up to and including some electronic locking systems if discs are taken outside of the expected environment in more secure implementations.

Of course, there's a price to pay, and it's not just the cost of media. Another drawback can be that write times are relatively high, because of the methods needed to write (requiring two passes of the laser), but that same factor that's an issue in write performance also means they're much more resilient to accidental corruption, and the casing prevents a lot of physical damage that a bare DVD-R is exposed to.

I can't personally vouch for that 30 years or 50 years, obviously, but I do have both MO and PD discs that must be, oh, 15 years old, and both they and the drives still work perfectly. This includes 128MB and 230MB versions, as well as 640MB, and I also have both 2.6GB and 4.7GB (per side) DVD-RAM discs in pretty much daily use. I've yet to have one fail.

To me, the art of using these depends on careful thought about how you lay data out, and what you choose to backup and/or archive with what technology. I carefully separate, for instance, the OS drive, program drives, volatile and non-volatile data. I keep the OS and program drives backed up, typically with TrueImage, both to DVD-R and HD, but the important data, which is either fairly small or fairly slow to change, is backed up to MO and/or DVD-RAM. For instance, I make sure my photo collection is backed up to DVD-RAM, though I've also got it on DVD-R and, sync'd to separate hard drives. Similarly, accounts data is backed up several ways, having come VERY close to catastrophe once when a PSU failure wrecked multiple hard drives, and I was rescued by the last copy I had .... on DVD-RAM.

As for hard drives, well, as kingpotnoodle said, pick your poison. You get much larger capacities, much lower cost/GB and much faster read and write times but you also get much higher susceptibility to damage, especially if you're carrying them about, such as shifting to off-site, and they get a bump or bang.

It's pick your poison, all right, and picking the right tool for the given job. DVD-RAM works beautifully for me, and has been dead reliable for years .... but that doesn't mean it'd suit everybody.

[aidanjt]

HDDs aren't *that* fragile. Modern drives will take a good 300G's of shock when powered off. Much more robust than your head for example.