Recommendations for internal Blu-Ray writers?

[Steve A.]

With the price of Blu-Ray media getting more reasonable I'm thinking of getting an internal drive to back up many of the music and movie files on my 16 external hard drives. I haven't opening most of these files for years and I think that Blu-Ray media would work better for me than hard drives. I used to archive my musical projects on CD's and then DVD's, but as the sizes increased that did not work for me any more.

I was looking into Blu-Ray drives and was unable to find specs on many of them especially what media they will read and write to. Even going to the mfg's sites and not finding them. It seems like most of the sites selling them just quote the same sales blurb. I am thinking of getting something that can handle dual-layer BD's when they come down in price. I just learned about HD DVD's so I don't know if that is something I want.

Rather than continue buying one new hard drive after another I think that there are a lot of files I can off-load onto external media.

Any suggestions for brands or models?

Thanks!

Steve Ahola

[tedmich]

I might get an Ultrium 2 or 3 drive (currently 2 for $120 or 3 for ~$175 on ebay) and use the cartridges. 2's do 200/400Gb and 3s do 400/800Gb and its VERY stable.

1Tb = 2 x Ultrium 3 at ~$25 each = $50
1Tb = 40 x BD-RE at $8 = $320

drive here: Quantum Ultrium LTO 3 internal tape storage drive, LTO-3 | eBay


people do like the LG WH12LS39 if you go the Blue ray route

As an aside Quantum stuff (like Ultrium) is reportedly unusable on Macs, but has a good chunk of the PC business market

[Steve A.]

Thanks! I was looking into those LG drives but could not find the exact specs on any of them. I checked again and did find the spec sheet:

http://www.lgsolutions.com/__downloa...39101122pr.pdf

I wasn't planning on using the rewritable media so 40 BD-R's would cost me around $40 which would change your equation. I never had much luck with tape storage- I went through maybe 6 different drives and they all became obsolete. I do understand that tape drives are great for backing up business computers on a nightly basis since they can be reused reliably.

Is there any brand of BD-R Media that you would recommend?

Steve Ahola

P.S. What are the M-DISCs? Is that the new HD DVD format which will store 15GB(sl)/20GB(dl)? Also is there any indexing software that you would recommend for the PC which would keep track of the files- or at least the folders- on the discs I'd burn?

Although I have around 12TB of files it is not as though I want to archive all of them on BD-R's. It would be more for storing files for projects I've already finished, and I'd probably make 2 copies of everything in case one failed prematurely.

[tedmich]

seem to be a lot of safe BD-R choices
Newegg.com - Computer Hardware, CD / DVD Burners & Media, CD / DVD / Blu-ray Media, BD-R


for software people like the free Easeus Todo, but for specific features you'll have to read reviews in CNET etc

I'd avoid non BD formats (remember Beta?)

[Martin Pedder]

More and more of my studio customers have given up on all forms of tape storage. They are just too time consuming and seem to be horrendously unreliable if used as the only form of long-term storage. If you don't use a tape or a drive for a few years, there is every chance of one chewing the other when you actually want to recover something.

Even with Blu-ray the cost of the discs and a drive is not wildly cheaper than hard drives. I know hard drives shot up in price a few months back with the floods in Thailand but prices are coming down again. When you factor in the time involved in tape or disc based archiving and restoration, they look less and less attractive. Nobody knows how long some of these optical media will actually last. Hard drives stored in a sealed bag with silica gel are very unlikely to have a problem when needed years into the future.

Recently, for USB external storage, I have found Iomega 1.5TB to be best value. They are only 5400 RPM spin, but that doesn't matter for backup use. SATA drives and a USB dock will be less still.

Martin

[Wittgenstein]

I have to agree with Martin. Burning the Blu rays can be painfully slow. All my computers now have USB 3.0 so I just use external hard drives (USB 3.0) for backup.

[Steve A.]

I think that tape cartridges can work great for a small office backing up their data on a schedule, like full backups done once a week and incremental backups done every night, with the tapes stored off-site until they are reused as per the schedule. (There are better solutions for larger offices.)

I plan to use something like BD-R's for archiving all of the source files and intermediate mixes of musical projects I finished a long time ago. I've been keeping them around on hard drives in case I want to remix or remaster something later which almost never happens but I feel better knowing that they are there (can you spell OCD? ) I have these files scattered across 15+ hard drives often in multiple locations so it makes a lot of sense for me to off-load them onto high capacity discs in duplicate where it will be easier to find them whenever I do need them. And use my hard drives for the files I need to access more often.

Thanks for all of your suggestions!

Steve Ahola