Better Storage Format: 25GB Blu-Ray Discs or HDDs?

[C1]

Ok, pretty much I've had a faulty Blu-Ray burner twice in a row that is made by LG and got it on Newegg. Considering how much Blu-Ray burners actually cost, is it better to just burn off 25GB Blu-Ray discs (as in RMA the one I have AGAIN and try to use these Blu-Ray disks that I have) or should I get it refunded from Newegg and buy a 1TB or 2TB hard drive? I also ask this because I have about 2TB worth of data DVDs (personal, not business) over about 7 or so years. External/internal HDD or Blu-Ray discs?

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-hong-kong-bacteria.html

 

[darksidesteve]

Buy hard drives. I'm to the point I don't even use optical media any more unless I'm giving something to a friend. I've gone with MVix to stream HD media to my TV's wireless from any computer in the house with an open share. Hard drives are so cheap and much faster than burning a stack of optical media. Not to mention, you can access your data much faster than any optical media.

Personally I've got about 10+ TB's of total storage on my network & external devices. If you do the math, that's 400x 25GB BluRay disc (and burns) at about $3 per disc for good branded 4x media that's $1200 + the cost of the burner/s to do it. You can get cheaper media sure, but remember buying cheap CD's & DVD's? They usually turned into coasters over time.

 

[Modelworks]

For preserving information I use 3things, DVDR, hard drives ,paper.
Paper is the best one of them all. If it doesn't get wet or burned the data can be viewed for centuries. Think of the books that are 500 years old and still can be read. Sometimes low tech is best. I know of several technology companies that still keep proprietary code and schematics in paper form in vaults as a way of future proofing that the information will always be accessible.

 

[exdeath]

Magnetic core memory. Seriously, I'm so freaking sick of slow ass hard drives and flash memory slowing down our technology as a species. There is NEVER enough disk IO. No point in having a 16 core CPU that can process 500 GB/sec when the average HDD does 50 MB/sec leaving you staring at an hourglass all day.

Our technology will never go to the next level if we don't do something about our archaic storage devices.

 

[VampyrByte]

For preserving information I use 3things, DVDR, hard drives ,paper.
Paper is the best one of them all. If it doesn't get wet or burned the data can be viewed for centuries. Think of the books that are 500 years old and still can be read. Sometimes low tech is best. I know of several technology companies that still keep proprietary code and schematics in paper form in vaults as a way of future proofing that the information will always be accessible.

When I want to ensure I will still be able to read my computer documents in thousands of years time, I paint them with sheeps blood on the wall of a cave.

I guess paper is good for things that are ment to be on paper, but program code? really? I wouldnt want to be the poor sod typing all that in to a post apocalyptic computer. Imagine if the pages fell off the shelf! You'd have to sort potentially millions of pages back together. No thanks.

 

[Ninjahedge]

The only way those disks become practical is when portability is important.

For me that would be things like music (imagine a 6 blu-ray changer in your car? Your lifetime collection could be ripped at 320 FLAC VBR.....) or different programs/instructional video or other things you would need to bring with you as your travel pack.

USB Keys are great for this too, but they are still WAY too expensive to practically carry around all that storage (how much is a BR disk? compared to a 32G card or key?).

I think that portable HD's are gaining steam, becoming more practical for external portable storage (1-2TB is common and relatively inexpensive now), and things like SDHC cards or SDHC's will eventually come down to what is practical for most of what we currently need to carry with us for work or other entertainment.

The only thing that they are NOT good for is big sice fast data rate applications like HDTV or higher resolution video, possible 3D animation or modeling, or things that, until now, have never even been on the table as "normal" work/entertainment options.


So, to answer your question, I would go for HD.

Organizing your personal stuff (movies, music and pr0n) into 25GB chunks might be a PITA. If you put the same effort into it, you could probably reduce the size (remove duplicates and such) and get it down to 1.5TB or so.

Then get one external and one internal drive (or get 3 internal and set up a RAID 5 with something like Drobo or 3Ware, for backup). Record all your stuff on both so you have a backup. Chances are very slim that both will go at the same time. (knock on wood).

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

The only way those disks become practical is when portability is important.

For me that would be things like music (imagine a 6 blu-ray changer in your car? Your lifetime collection could be ripped at 320 FLAC VBR.....) or different programs/instructional video or other things you would need to bring with you as your travel pack.

USB Keys are great for this too, but they are still WAY too expensive to practically carry around all that storage (how much is a BR disk? compared to a 32G card or key?).

I think that portable HD's are gaining steam, becoming more practical for external portable storage (1-2TB is common and relatively inexpensive now), and things like SDHC cards or SDHC's will eventually come down to what is practical for most of what we currently need to carry with us for work or other entertainment.

The only thing that they are NOT good for is big sice fast data rate applications like HDTV or higher resolution video, possible 3D animation or modeling, or things that, until now, have never even been on the table as "normal" work/entertainment options.


So, to answer your question, I would go for HD.

Organizing your personal stuff (movies, music and pr0n) into 25GB chunks might be a PITA. If you put the same effort into it, you could probably reduce the size (remove duplicates and such) and get it down to 1.5TB or so.

Then get one external and one internal drive (or get 3 internal and set up a RAID 5 with something like Drobo or 3Ware, for backup). Record all your stuff on both so you have a backup. Chances are very slim that both will go at the same time. (knock on wood).

Well technically, a 32GB USB stick is going to be cheaper than having a Blueray burner, plus ensuring your recipient has a bluray capable ROM drive.

 

[C1]

HD storage for me has proved itself, thus far, as the preferred method for large archive storage. Optical storage is way too slow, but is a consideration in special situations (eg, low priority archiving). Also, for optical, if one is concerned about longevity, then DvD RAM is supposed to be a much more hardy/reliable media than straight/regular DvD media. I think that large file archival storage such as that involving entertainment type media (eg, commercial movies), optical (BR) will show itself to be relatively expensive and even possibly inconvenient.

 

[Ninjahedge]

Well technically, a 32GB USB stick is going to be cheaper than having a Blueray burner, plus ensuring your recipient has a bluray capable ROM drive.

I know what you are saying, but a 32G Flash stick is more expensive than a blank BlueRay......

I think the proprietary nature of the technology is killing it before it can get running like CD-Rom and DVD-Rom took off.

You pay (now) $20 for a burner and ¢¢ for a disk and there is no question what your disposable archive media is.....

 

[WinnieThePujols]

I personally prefer backing my stuff up to disks. Hard drives are faster and pretty cheap, but they're also pretty unreliable. The failure rates of the 1.5-2 TB disks are pretty unsettling (judging this by reviews on NewEgg, not anecdotal experience). With that in mind, you essentially have two options: you can either run the risk of permanently losing the data, or you can use RAID; there are two problems with going the RAID route: there's a high up-front cost if you want a lot of space (whereas with disposable disks you can just gradually buy media as needed), and you're also losing some of the value by paying for redundancy. Let's say you set up a RAID 5 with 1 TB hard drives -- you're paying for 4 TB but you're only getting 3 TB of space.

I guess my personal philosophy is to have a large amount of space on my computer (a TB or so for media) for stuff I access frequently or am likely to use (music, favorite shows, movies, etc); for stuff I want to keep but won't necessarily use more than once every few months or so, I like to archive it to Blu-Ray data disks.

 

[Modelworks]

I guess paper is good for things that are ment to be on paper, but program code? really? I wouldnt want to be the poor sod typing all that in to a post apocalyptic computer. Imagine if the pages fell off the shelf! You'd have to sort potentially millions of pages back together. No thanks.

did you know that the code for several big name companies, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, ARM, Intel, all have paper copies ?

You print the code out as OCR text using an OCR font called ISO 1073-1:1976. Then it can be scanned back in as fast as the scanner can read it. Paper isn't just for preserving things for centuries, it actually saved IBM a ton of money when they learned that they needed the source code for a program created just 4 years earlier. The backups of the code had become unreadable from the only hard drive that contained the code. If it wasn't for the paper copies the code would have been lost.

Consider photos . Printed photos can fade, negatives can deteriorate . Digital copies can preserve them for the future so it would seem that is the best approach, but it is the one with the most risk if it is the sole backup method. A printed photo or negative can degrade with time but even with the degradation you can still restore the photo. Digital has the inherent flaw that if too much information is damaged you lose the ability to recover any of the image. Corrupt the wrong bits and you lose everything. Printed out media is susceptible to some of the same things as a hard drive, water and fire, but the chance of total loss is less because paper is not susceptible to shock, magnetic fields, electronics failures, mechanical parts.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

You print the code out as OCR text using an OCR font called ISO 1073-1:1976. Then it can be scanned back in as fast as the scanner can read it. Paper isn't just for preserving things for centuries, it actually saved IBM a ton of money when they learned that they needed the source code for a program created just 4 years earlier. The backups of the code had become unreadable from the only hard drive that contained the code. If it wasn't for the paper copies the code would have been lost.

Pardon my saying so, but storing such critical data in only one place is a hell of a stupid thing to do. IBM or not. In fact, for comparable cost/space, I would count digital storage much more efficient and safe. For example, a ream of paper costs what, $5? That seems reasonable. Imagine all the code you could fit into that!

Until, of course, you realize that the same data could easily fit (with room for another 50 pages or so) into a 2MB text file.

So let's scale that up. For a 1TB hard drive's worth of code (a very cumbersome beast to deal with regardless of format, I'm sure) you would need (using base 10 instead of 2) about 275,000,000 sheets of paper - that's 550,000 reams. Obviously, double-sided makes 275,000 reams or 137,500,000 sheets. For that cost, over a million dollars, you could have hundreds of copies distributed around the world - in the cloud, in bunkers in the middle of the sahara, in the CEO's office - and you would still have the money left over to maintain these copies by periodically cloning the data to new drives ad infinitum. Never mind the space needed to store 275,000,000 sheets of paper. I mean, one ream is reasonably heavy already, for just paper. Imagine half a million of them.

 

[Modelworks]

Pardon my saying so, but storing such critical data in only one place is a hell of a stupid thing to do. IBM or not. In fact, for comparable cost/space, I would count digital storage much more efficient and safe. For example, a ream of paper costs what, $5? That seems reasonable. Imagine all the code you could fit into that!

Companies and governments store code on one backup every day. Nasa lost thousands of lines of code because the only backup of the data was on magnetic tape that was overwritten. True the same thing happens with paper documents and I am not saying that paper is the ultimate form of data backup, but it should not be dismissed either.

Digital storage is more efficient but it isn't safer. Digital relies heavily on technology in order to retrieve the data, paper doesn't if the data is printed in readable form. If you are printing out data for backup purposes with the idea of recovering it later with the same program there is even software that encodes data with error recovery and encryption that is able to achieve megabytes of data per page. The better the printer the more that can be encoded. There are also algorithms that use colors in the prints that quadruples the storage ability.

I have seen what doing only digital backups does . When working at Sandia I often came across programs that many people would love to have the source code to. The problem was the programmers were dead, the only copies were on magnetic tape, and the money to reconstruct a device that could read the old tapes was ludicrous. Look around today and try to find a RLL card for an old hard drive that will work in todays pc and then try to find someone who knows how to make it all work. That was just a little more than 15 years ago when they were still used by many organizations. People tend to think like whatever tech they use now will always exist forever. You better make sure you keep up with all your backups and keep moving them to what can be accessed at the current time.

 

[Ninjahedge]

Model,

The problem is that because digital is so much easier and cheaper, we take it for granted and back up EVERYTHING.

When you back up every little piece of information everyone in your company/agency produces every single day you can easily get a mountainload of information that you really do not need.

When you pay a warehouse $$$ to store the TONS of paper you need to have records like this, you quickly start organizing and consolidating your stash to the point where you have what you need, not everything you have ever done.

THAT is what is needed in the digital community. You do not need every line of code ever made, but rather every working line you have implimented.....

People have to take the Paper mindset and apply that to the Digital realm. Once that happens, you will have 10 copies of important stuff, all indexed, synchronized and cross referenced, that would be able to insure your records for a long time to come.


BTW, if you think paper is "the thing" and microfilm is the unstoppable archive megalith, come with me one time into finding drawings for a building done before the turn of the century (hell, even one that may have been done as late as the 50's!). After looking through unorganized city records, and an old filing cabinet that has an incomplete set of drawings left in the building by the original owner, you will find that Paper is far from perfect.