Blue Ray for data storage?

[Nocandu]

Hi

I was wondering if Blue Ray is a valid choice for data storage. I usually associate it with video.

I'm ordering a new computer and thought it might be a good idea to have both a DVD and Blue Ray disk writer, or a combo unit.

I know that for now at least I will have to put stuff I wan't to send to someone on DVD, as they may not have the equipment to read a BD, but is there any reason that I shouldn't use BD to back up my own data?

Mike

 

[gbaughma]

Not that I'm aware of. One of the selling points of BluRay was 50GB of storage on a single disc.

I'm looking forward to the recorders coming down in price (c. $100)



Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[JimInKS]

I just did a quick check on prices. It looks like 25G Blue ray disks are about $4 each. You can get a 250G sata drive for about $45. So cost per bit for storage is about a wash. (The 50G Blue Ray disks were much more expensive)

Your Blue ray drive will probably cost at least $150, you can get an external hard drive "toaster" for less than $50.

So, if you are using this for backup and the amount of data is well over 25G, an external hard drive may be a better choice. You could get 3 250G drives and a "toaster" for less than $200.

I don't know what the reliability of BR disks are supposed to be. Other optical media can be a little finicky. Hard drives are pretty reliable if treated "very gently".

 

[Grenage]

With a relatively cheap LTO4 drive being able to store up to 1.6TB compressed on a single tape, I can't see optical media ever catching it up in either price or capacity.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[kmcferrin]

Grenage, it depends on if you're talking about a business, a small business, or an individual. LTO4 tape cartridges cost over $100 each the last time that I bought any, and the drive itself was several thousand dollars. On top of that, you'll never get a true 1.6TB worth of data on a tape. Iit will usually be more like 1.0-1.2, depending on the data you're compressing.

On the other hand, you can buy a 1.5TB SATA hard disk for $120 or less. That SATA disk will fit a native 1.5 TB of data, or using the LTO compression math 3.0 TB compressed. Not only that, but it will have far faster random access (it won't have to roll through the entire tape to get to the blocks that it needs to read/write). For the cost of a single LTO4 drive and tape you could have a hot-swap SATA bay and at least a week's worth of SATA drives to use as backups.

Of course hard disks aren't really suitable for long-term archiving (and neither is tape, for that matter), so optical is probably still your best bet there.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[Grenage]

I suppose for smaller installations that is true, but LTO it still an attractively priced. We picked our drive up for under £1000, and the tapes were £30 each.

I completely missed the part where the OP mentioned it being a home PC!

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[Nocandu]

Hi

After reading the comment I decided to just buy a 1TB external hard drive, I already have a 500 GB one.

It doesn't cost any more and then the Blu-Ray and I don't have to buy disks which I probably wont be able to find two years from now when I need them anyway.

Mike

 

[Sympology]

The real advantage of optical / tape over HDD is off site storage. You are more likely to upload all your photo's, music etc on a removable media and pop round your folks house and say "can you look after this, just in case", than leave a TB drive round there.



Most people spend their time on the "urgent" rather than on the "important."

 

[vacunita]

After reading the comment I decided to just buy a 1TB external hard drive, I already have a 500 GB one.

It doesn't cost any more and then the Blu-Ray and I don't have to buy disks which I probably wont be able to find two years from now when I need them anyway.

2 years from now there is no guarantee your shiny 1Tb drive will still be functional to retrieve any data you may have stored.
At this point in time, and until a better alternative comes around optical storage media is still the best option for long term data storage.

Optical media won't mysteriously fail, or develop bad sectors if left alone in its box.

Its only when its handled and "manhandled" that it will develop scratches and other blemishes that may impair its ability to be read correctly.






----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[gbaughma]

vacunita:

I don't know that I totally agree with that statement. I'm very careful with my CD's, and I've seen several brands grow "holes" in the reflective layer, making them unusable.

No scratches or manhandling... they disintegrated from the inside.



Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[vacunita]

In my defense have to say that I have a HP CD burned back when I bought my first HP CD burner in 1998 or 1999 and I can still read everything off it just fine.

10 years later it still works just fine.
Show me a Hard drive from back then that still works.

Yes I've experienced the flaking off of the reflective surface on various other Cd's but its a minority in my case. And they'll still outlast a hard drive with mechanical parts 80 to 90% of the time.


----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[kmcferrin]

See what I mean? No matter what you choose there's some potential downside.

I do think that the issue with the "decaying" optical media, while true, will often have more to do with the quality of the media being used. A good quality DVD or CD disc should last a good ten years. A cheap one...not so much.

On the other hand, I have hard disks that are 15 years old that still work fine. I also have hard disks that are two years old that don't. It can be hit or miss, but nothing is 100% foolproof.

For the average home user who wants to back up their PC every night (or every week) and only wants the ability to recover in case of a hardware failure, a hard disk would be a good option. It's inexpensive, fast, fairly reliable, and if the drive fails then you'll notice it while taking a regular backup and be able to address it (hopefully) before you need it for a restore. For someone who wants to keep an archive of their PC or documents that will last for years, mechanical disks are probably not as good an option. Optical would make more sense, but you'd probably want multiple copies in case one "goes bad". If you're worried about your house burning down, you might want an online backup instead. It really is a matter of determining what specific backup features you need, because with backups there is no "one size fits all" solution, even for businesses.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[Nocandu]

I decided to get the Blu-Ray and a new external hard drive, that should cover everything.

Things like my Photos, Music files, artwork and stuff that I keep forever like downloaded software need to go on some sort of disk and even DVDs don't have enough capacity to do it easily.

I can make my Ghost backups on the external hard drives and save everything in case of a crash.

I'm trying to get stuff organised right now so that I can move everything to my new computer without losing anything.

Norton Ghost 10 which I have won't seem to run on Windows 7 so my Ghost backups won't do me any good until I get some form of Ghost running on my new machine.

So I guess I'll have to check into that.

I don't even know if I do get a new version of Ghost, whether it will open my old backups or not.

The backup files for each drive are about 70 Gigs.
So I guess I better figure that out.

 

[kjv1611]

If you were backing up using Norton Ghost before, and backed up your entire system, I think that once you have Windows 7 running, you may as well just clear out all your old Ghost images, and create a shiny new one. I may be wrong, but with the way Ghost works, I think you won't be able to go back to the old ones anyway, b/c it's an entirely different operating system.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[GabrielBL]

Blu-Ray is fine for storage, but it depends what you are storing. Like everyone else said, optical, tape, spinning hard drives, solid-state hard drives, they all have their pros and cons. Personally, I’m not a fan of DVD / Blu-Ray storage because it’s hard to organize and slower to read. If I need something off a disk, I need to locate, hope I noted on the disk what exactly is on it, then put it in and load it. NAS devices are dropping in price and provide redundant storage that’s accessible over the network for all computers. That said, I use a 500GB external hard drive to backup my Macbook and another drive that I keep for storage. When the 2nd drive is full, I buy a 3rd and so on.

Keep in mind that technology changes. At one time, 1.44mb was more then enough storage space on a 3.5” floppy, computers haven’t come with those in years. CDs and DVDs will be around for a while, but how long no one knows? IDE hard drives are slowly dying off, go look at Newegg and see how many IDE burners and hard drives they offer, most all are SATA now. At some point, they too will stop. Be ready to move / migrate all your data every 10 years or so to the newer, better, faster, whatever technology.

Gabriel Blanc-Laine
VP Sales & Marketing

http://www.Qtask.com

 

[kjv1611]

==>>Keep in mind that technology changes. At one time, 1.44mb was more then enough storage space on a 3.5" floppy, computers haven't come with those in years. CDs and DVDs will be around for a while, but how long no one knows? IDE hard drives are slowly dying off, go look at Newegg and see how many IDE burners and hard drives they offer, most all are SATA now. At some point, they too will stop. Be ready to move / migrate all your data every 10 years or so to the newer, better, faster, whatever technology.

I agree fully with this. I just wanted to mention a couple things, not really pertinent, but interesting/funny:

1. Just the other day, I took my USB floppy drive over to my dad-in-law's house, to help him retrieve his documents off his floppy disk. I had rebuilt a computer, and given it to him from parts that were a little old, but way better than what he had. I left a floppy drive in that one, so he could still use it if he wanted. But at the same time, I had given him a USB thumb drive, and told him it'd be better than the floppy. I don't think he ever touched the thumb drive, b/c the floppy was what he was used to. Well, just so happens that machine had died this past week, and he got a new machine - no floppy. So now he couldn't get to his documents. So, I copied them to the new computer via the USB floppy drive, and then backed up to his thumb drive.

2. NewEgg and parts. NewEgg, it seems to me is not one to wait around. They usually will be the first to stop carrying something that's getting old - most things, anyway. That said, I totally know what you're talking about. I'm now finding with some of the machines I get in for repairs/upgrades, that it costs more money now to replace their IDE components (or older RAM, such as DDR-1), b/c those aren't mainstream anymore, and on th way out the door! I was just reminded of that over the past couple days.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[ArizonaGeek]

On the other hand, I have hard disks that are 15 years old that still work fine. I also have hard disks that are two years old that don't. It can be hit or miss, but nothing is 100% foolproof.

The 15 year old hard drives were probably only a gig or two, very little heat compared to 2 year old hard drives that might be 100 or more gigs and probably 500 gigs. Older drives have single platters and slower spin. But when it comes to data nothing is perfect. Having more than one backup and someplace other than where your main data storage is located will help reduce the chances of loss.

Now when SSD drives get as big as regular drives and as cheap, we'll be in business! A 1tb SSD for $100 ... drooooolllll!

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[kjv1611]

Now when SSD drives get as big as regular drives and as cheap, we'll be in business! A 1tb SSD for $100 ... drooooolllll!

Yeah, then maybe it'd be actually feasible for some of the rest of us to do some fun task like this:

http://www.break.com/usercontent/2009/3/24-256GB-Samsung-MLC-SSD-s-683890.html

Well, for me, minus the orange hair... or ANY hair for that matter. [LOL]

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[Nocandu]

I have quite a bit of faith in my external drives because then are never turned on unless I am using them.

I may go weeks with out backing anything up or restoring from them.

I'm assuming that since my regular hard drives that run continuously last for years the ones that only run a few hours a month will last a lot longer.

I never have anything important stored on only one drive and I never store anything on the drive that has Windows on it, only my installed software.