BD as a replacement for HDD?

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Black5Lion

Limp Gawd
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Jan 1, 2013
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I'm not sure this is in the right place, but as stated in the title: Are Blu-ray disks a valid option as a replacement for an external HDD? (think long-term storage and things that I will never delete)

I currently have 2 external HDDs a 1TB and a 2TB, they're both almost full (around 50GB left). My first Idea was to build a NAS, but I didn't need to access it on more than one pc at a time and I didn't want it to run 24/7, so I thought RaidBox but that turned out too expensive for my budget :(

So now I've checked around amazon for blu-rays and I could get a 25 set of 25gb BD 6x for ~$25 which is about 25GB/$ and around 625GB for only $25! :D
External writers are as cheap as $100 so that shouldn't be a problem :)

Now rises the problem :( As I never used Blu-rays (except for a couple of movies on my PS3) before, I'm not quite sure how I would go about writing/reading from them. Is it as simple as DVDs where I just write with something like Nero or the built in windows burner and just open it with windows explorer whenever I need it? Or do I need special software to use Blu-Ray disks? (I'm not talking about buying blu-ray movies, I'm talking about general stuff, like family photos and videos, some old shows and cartoons, etc.. they'll be listed as general files)

For those who don't want to bother reading ^ that wall of text,
TL;DR
Do I need special software to use blu-rays as if they were DVDs/CDs?


Edit: I figured I should include links to what I'm talking about, so here:
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SE-506BB-TSBD-External-Blu-ray/dp/B00AO1XFM0/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-9745...&qid=1392397890&sr=8-1&keywords=blu-ray+blank
Are those two compatible? Alternatively will it be chaper/better to use dual layer BD or single layer BD?

Edit2: Yet another question rises, if this works (which I hope it does...) I want to make sure, are Blu-ray disks write ones and read as much as you want? or are they like RW DVD that you can erase and rewrite?
Also what is the difference between BD-R (seems to be readily available) and BD-RE (can't find anything on it except the Samsung writers page) ?
 
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why not just buy a 640GB HDD used off the forums? $25 is about the right price. Maybe $30.
 
you could burn your files onto bdr's with imgburn, that's what I use. but after reading some of the threads in the cdfreaks forums im not sure id trust bdr's as a long term backup unless you buy the best quality discs.
 
Kelvarr said:
why not just buy a 640GB HDD used off the forums? $25 is about the right price. Maybe $30.
Click to expand...
I've had a bad experience with HDDs before :( (my WD MyBook decided it didn't want to run all of a sudden), and since I don't live in the US, I really buy stuff from others on this forum :(

dangerouseddy said:
you could burn your files onto bdr's with imgburn, that's what I use. but after reading some of the threads in the cdfreaks forums im not sure id trust bdr's as a long term backup unless you buy the best quality discs.
Click to expand...
I heard Verbatim were the best ever since the DVD days, so they should work right?
 
IIRC the filesystems you typically put on there still don't support > 2 or > 4 GB/file. That is really annoying.
 
uOpt said:
IIRC the filesystems you typically put on there still don't support > 2 or > 4 GB/file. That is really annoying.
Click to expand...

Really?! :eek:

I guess I could split bigger files but then I won't be able to read them off of the Blu-Ray :(
Real disappointment, but I think I could deal with it :/

Thanks for pointing it out tho :)

Edit: but wait how do movies us up 20GB+ of the Blu-Rays? are they split? is that why you need special software to play Blu-Ray movies?
 
dangerouseddy said:
you can use udf, that works for 4gb+ files.

see here for good archival bdr's, seems Panasonic archival's are good :- http://club.myce.com/f33/best-bd-r-archival-330175/
Click to expand...

It's getting a bit complicated :p
I'm guessing ImgBurn would let me choose the filesystem in which I could pick udf and have all my files :) Thanks :D

Sorry to be ignorant but by archival you mean the disks right? not the writer? So I should get the Samsung drive and Panasonic blank disks?

Hmmm.... Panasonic disks seem to be a bit more expensive :/ Maybe I'll get Panasonic disks for irreplaceable data and Verbatim for all my other things :)

Thanks for everyone who replied you've been of great help :D
 
yes you can set the filesystem to udf in imageburn, you should be able to burn all the files you have to a disc.

archival grade discs yes, supposed to be better quality and guaranteed to last long time.

not sure about samsung bdr drives, should be ok will those discs though.
 
I used to do this back in the DVD days and it became a huge pain in the butt even for my write once data. Once you start getting past managing 20+ discs it really becomes a choir to find and recover that one file you need.

Another thing to keep in mind (this is true for HDD too) is that you need to have a device that can read the media in many years to come. So if you go this route make sure to keep a reader around that is still supported.
 
I can't imagine that stacks of Blu-rays would be easier to deal with than a few external hard drives, even if you had everything backed up to two drives for redundancy.
 
I would recommend against using BD disks to archive. It gets a bit troublesome cataloging everything, storing them, labeling them and getting this to fit.

HDD to die when they are not in use. If you need to access the data on multiple computers you can get HDD readers like this. If you are concerned about drive failure, get as second drive and this will make a clone. If you one need to use it on one or two desktop computers you can get a drive caddy so that you could easily swap drives and safely store them when not in use. DVDs were a cheap alternative back in the day but BD disks are not that cheap.
 
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A 3TB external drive should cost you about $100 (I paid $95 for one last week).
$100 will only get you 2.5TB of BD storage space.

External drives are cheaper, faster, easier. Just get another one.
 
I bought a LG BD burner a few years ago and burn final files like music, tv shows, concerts and games/programs.
I've been using Verbatim since back in the floppy days and never had any issues with them, still one of the best.
BD has come down in price to a buck a disk, cheaper then DVD's now and can easily be found on amazon.
Now BD-RE's are much more expensive at around 5 bucks a disc so if you want to archive stuff you might change your mind later to keep or refresh this is the route but it's an expensive route to go.
 
silk186 said:
I would recommend against using BD disks to archive. It gets a bit troublesome cataloging everything, storing them, labeling them and getting this to fit.

HDD to die when they are not in use. If you need to access the data on multiple computers you can get HDD readers like this. If you are concerned about drive failure, get as second drive and this will make a clone. If you one need to use it on one or two desktop computers you can get a drive caddy so that you could easily swap drives and safely store them when not in use. DVDs were a cheap alternative back in the day but BD disks are not that cheap.
Click to expand...
I kind of thought about doing this, but it seemed too expensive to just try out. :/
And if HDDs die when they're not used it could get troublesome :<
Also I really don't mind having a collection of disks, since I used to have alot of disks back in the PS2 days (well over a hundred) and I didn't have much trouble managing that.
arentol said:
A 3TB external drive should cost you about $100 (I paid $95 for one last week).
$100 will only get you 2.5TB of BD storage space.

External drives are cheaper, faster, easier. Just get another one.
Click to expand...
Hmmm..... seems interesting ... The thing I hate about HDDs is I have to plug them in to see whats inside, and if it breaks I lose all my data, unlike BD where I would only lose part of my data :/ IDK maybe I'll end up getting both.
ep0x73 said:
I bought a LG BD burner a few years ago and burn final files like music, tv shows, concerts and games/programs.
I've been using Verbatim since back in the floppy days and never had any issues with them, still one of the best.
BD has come down in price to a buck a disk, cheaper then DVD's now and can easily be found on amazon.
Now BD-RE's are much more expensive at around 5 bucks a disc so if you want to archive stuff you might change your mind later to keep or refresh this is the route but it's an expensive route to go.
Click to expand...
I don't suppose I need BD-RE for archiving since I'll only burn the things once, or are BD-RE known to last longer?
 
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Black5Lion said:
I don't suppose I need BD-RE for archiving since I'll only burn the things once, or are BD-RE known to last longer?
Click to expand...

They last the same but with RE you can erase them and reuse them so if you were to screw up something it's not going in the trash.

When I burn ISO's or want to try a different burn program I'll use a RE or when I archive something that is not complete and may change in the future.

I just checked and RE's have come down to $15, they were $25 when I bought a pack last year. [amazon]

t9dtfd.jpg


As for whats on the disc, I simply label them A01 or something and then create a text or PDF of what is on the disc and catalog it.

I can look up what's on it before I even put it in the drive.
 
ep0x73 said:
They last the same but with RE you can erase them and reuse them so if you were to screw up something it's not going in the trash.

When I burn ISO's or want to try a different burn program I'll use a RE or when I archive something that is not complete and may change in the future.

I just checked and RE's have come down to $15, they were $25 when I bought a pack last year. [amazon]

t9dtfd.jpg


As for whats on the disc, I simply label them A01 or something and then create a text or PDF of what is on the disc and catalog it.

I can look up what's on it before I even put it in the drive.
Click to expand...

My idea exactly :D
Thanks for sharing :)
So I guess I'll grab a bunch of BD-R disks, because most of my collection is already done, and maybe a few BD-RE for those ongoing things :)

Thanks again to everyone who replied :)
 
Don't forget the slicing thing.

Sure, BD blanks cost about the same per GB, which is about 25GB/$, as 3 TB disks.

However:
  • If you want to fill each BD blank to close to 100% that is significant work. Normally you will dump random folders on them so that each disk is at 70-90% or so.
  • Redundancy is effectively reduced to "raid1" aka multiple independent copies. You cannot pick other redundancy levels equivalent to raid5 or raid6 unless you go pretty crazy.

So, the cost for good redundancy, which is a 6-disk raid6 (4 net) and double BDs that comes to
12 GB/$ for BD
18 GB/$ for raid6

And the raid6 has higher redundancy, you can lose any 2 segments, whereas losing the wrong 2 BDs means loss.
 
I think I'll get both.
A 3TB HDD for important stuff, and BDs for things I'm done with/ won't need for a while.
Oh and of course irreplaceable data will have copies on both the HDD and a couple BDs. :)

Thanks everyone :D
 
I don't see how anyone could trust something that stays connected to a power outlet like a raid setup to be a reliable backup. Theft is also a real concern that many people over look. I just made a similar post in the optical forum but I think discs are at least still a viable redundancy.

M-Disc claims to be releasing a bluray version and from the little research I have done they are the only real archival type media out there. The writing layer is a rock like surface and "advertised" to last much longer than dye recordables. HDDs seem to be at a all time low for reliability when reading reviews and I'm not sure they are much better than standard optical media.

My plan is to use all ssd drives along with many brands of optical media. With a esata dock I would think a ssd would also be a good replacement for usb flash drives. To make sure the files are still good I'm using multipar so I can checkup on them. I try to organize my folders into chunks so they will fit on a dvd or bluray along with parity info.

It also helps to be a data minimalist :D

Now that I have a ultraviolet account I can stream most of my movies on vudu and have no need for a huge media server. I also realized that most of the photo's and home videos I had were not worth saving so I deleted them and focused on backing up the great ones.
 
Just read recently that Facebook uses a Humongous BD back up strategy as their preference for least accessible data assets. Don't remember the exact #... but
The amount of disks they went through a year was insanely Facebook large.
Might be worth googling to see what strategy they have in place?
 
claydough said:
Just read recently that Facebook uses a Humongous BD back up strategy as their preference for least accessible data assets. Don't remember the exact #... but
The amount of disks they went through a year was insanely Facebook large.
Might be worth googling to see what strategy they have in place?
Click to expand...

Makes me wonder how long one of those drives is supposed to last.

My DVD writers sure didn't last long when writing a lot. I stopped doing that sort of thing partially for that reason.
 
Black5Lion said:
Also I really don't mind having a collection of disks, since I used to have alot of disks back in the PS2 days (well over a hundred) and I didn't have much trouble managing that.
Click to expand...

You'd need 60 Blu-Ray discs to equal the space of a single 3TB hard drive. And you'd have to take a lot of time to organize your data into 50GB chunks for each Blu-Ray... and burn those 60 Blu-Rays.

Then you'd need some method of cataloging what is on each Blu-Ray if you want to find a particular file... versus a hard drive where you can just browse or search its contents.

As you can probably tell... I'm in the hard drive camp. My archives are on a 2TB hard drive... and then I have another 2TB hard drive that is a clone of the first drive. I'm not really worried about hard drive failure... that's why I have two drives. If one drive does fail... I can buy another drive and copy everything in one fell swoop.

And it would be easy to copy everything to a third hard drive if I wanted to (and leave that drive at a friend's house or a safety deposit box... off-site...)

I, personally, don't think dozens and dozens of optical discs are a substitute for a single hard drive. If you're worried about hard drives failing after being left alone for a while... just plug them in every so often using one of those hard drive docks. You'd at least be able to check the entire contents of the hard drive at once. (and copy everything to another hard drive if needed)

How do you plan to check all 60 of the Blu-Rays to see if they are still good after a while?

Black5Lion said:
I think I'll get both.
A 3TB HDD for important stuff, and BDs for things I'm done with/ won't need for a while.
Oh and of course irreplaceable data will have copies on both the HDD and a couple BDs. :)
Click to expand...

If it was me... I'd just use multiple hard drives... and skip the Blu-Rays altogether. :D

Like I said... it's much easier to revisit your data on a hard drive than shuffling through dozens of optical discs. Hard drives are cheap, huge, and easy to duplicate.

I plan on moving the data on my two 2TB drives to two 4TB next year. I can do that easily by just copying the old drives to the new drives... all at once. (or make more copies on additional hard drives)
 
ZodaEX said:
Wrong. Tell that to my dead 320GB WD Green Power that died while sitting on my shelf for 6 months.
Click to expand...

Everybody had HDD shelf death over the years. Silk just lost it for a moment there.
 
As someone who is currently doing some spring cleaning and going through my collection of archived CDs/DVDs... I'm finding a large percentage of even the "data archival" disks are unreadable after 8-10 years of shelf storage. I guess it helps in the decision of what I "need" to keep... by not even being an option ;) Oh well, I'll be able to get rid of several CD towers in my office that have made several moves over the years.... and just replace them with a small fire safe and a couple of hard drives with important backups while everything also gets backed up to Crashplan...
 
uOpt said:
Makes me wonder how long one of those drives is supposed to last.

My DVD writers sure didn't last long when writing a lot. I stopped doing that sort of thing partially for that reason.
Click to expand...

Here is a link to one of the recent Facebook/Blu-ray press releases...
The title of the ArsTechnica article suggests Facebook thinks the storage strategy has a 50 year lifespan!?:

Cheap storage with a 50-year life span? Facebook spreads the gospel of Blu-ray:
http://arstechnica.com/information-...lu-ray-discs-are-perfect-for-the-data-center/


Jon Brodkin arstechnica.com said:
Facebook's hardware guru thinks Blu-ray discs might have a brighter future in the data center than in consumers' homes.

We wrote on Wednesday about how Facebook has developed a prototype storage system that uses 10,000 Blu-ray discs to hold a petabyte of data. After that story posted we were able to talk to Frank Frankovsky, VP of hardware design and supply chain operations at Facebook, to find out just why he's so excited about the project.

While the Blu-ray storage system is just a prototype, Facebook hopes to get it in production sometime this year and share the design with the Open Compute Project community to spur adoption elsewhere. If Facebook and others start using Blu-ray discs for long-term archival storage, Blu-ray manufacturers will see a new market opportunity and pursue it, Frankovsky said.

"I think that the media suppliers, especially after all of the community excitement around it with Open Compute, they see a huge opportunity here," Frankovsky said. "Economies of scale could take over really quickly, and they could start producing those discs for the Open Compute community at much lower cost than they do today because, believe it or not, this is one of those areas where really high-capacity Blu-ray discs are in relatively low demand on the consumer side and in relatively high demand on the data center side."

Facebook intends to use Blu-rays for "cold storage," data that can't be thrown out but may not be accessed for many years, if at all. The best near-term use case is backups of photos and videos, but the discs could also be used for any data that Facebook is required by law to retain for a certain number of years.

Facebook's cold storage today is entirely on spinning disks. The prototype Blu-ray system is estimated to be 50 percent cheaper than the disk-based cold storage, and 80 percent more energy efficient.
.
Click to expand...

Was wondering myself, what strategy an operation of Facebook scale would
use to manage the actual physically intensive nature of such a massive manual optical undertaking???
According to the article...
a robot lives inside and manages the complexities of the storage rack system??? And when the robot isn't werkin' on the disks he consumes virtually no power at all! opting instead to pursue extracurricular romances out in space with lascivious "eve" robots...

Facebook VP Jay Parikh said:
The discs are housed in a fancy rack that holds 24 magazines, with each magazine holding 36 cartridges, and each cartridge holding 12 Blu-ray discs, for a total of 10,368. A robot lives and works inside the rack.

"We have a robotic picker that will go to a specified magazine and then locate a cartridge, it will unlock that cartridge, removing the drawer, and a picker will go down and is able to select a specified disc in that 12-disc arrangement," Facebook's Giovanni Coglitore said in a video demo posted yesterday.

When the robot isn't working, the rack consumes virtually no power, he said.
.
Click to expand...

enthusiast level robot blu ray back up storage strategy?

Facebook VP Jay Parikh said:
"Each disc is certified for 50 years of operation; you can actually get some discs that are certified for 1,000 years of reliability," Coglitore said. "Because the media is separate from the drives, if you ever have a drive issue, you simply replace the drive, and you won't have to replace the data within a disc. From a reliability and operational standpoint it's quite elegant and efficient."

Facebook is careful in how it's rolling out the optical storage system to production.

As Facebook does with other new technologies, "we'll start it out in what we call shadow testing," Frankovsky said. "Until it's proven, we'll take relatively small quantities, and we'll just mirror data from what's in production and shadow that data to the optical rack."

While Blu-ray can't match the performance of hard disk drives, that isn't as important for cold storage. Frankovsky also said the Blu-ray system will be "far superior to tape" because of its durability and performance.

It could also provide benefits in recovery from failure. Frankovsky said Facebook uses erasure encoding, which "distributes a file across multiple physical devices so that in any event of a failure of a physical device you can always recreate the file."

With disk drives, "you need to have a relatively aggressive erasure encoding environment where you have a lot more physical spinning disks, so you can sustain multiple failures and be able to recreate the file in any situation," Frankovsky said. Because the predictive annual failure rate for optical discs is lower, "it's quite possible that you won't need to over-provision how much optical capacity you have to be able to get the same level of protection with the complete file rebuild. There's kind of a double goodness there. Bit for bit, it's lower cost, and if we can over-provision less with optical, you can move that needle even further on the cost-saving side."
.
Click to expand...

according to the article Facebook has also considered the use of "substandard near death" NAND flash memory for cold storage...

Facebook VP Jay Parikh said:
The idea is to take "partially good NAND flash which otherwise would have been sold off as thumb drives or potentially even scrap," Frankovsky said.

Flash storage is often thrown out by manufacturers when just a few cells have gone bad, he said. With smart enough software algorithms, "you can be cognizant of where the weak or bad cells are and write around those cells."

The bad flash initiative isn't as far along as the Blu-ray project. But both have progressed pretty quickly since Facebook revealed their existence last year, Frankovsky said. They could end up being important tools as data storage needs grow.

IDC predicts that by 2020 the entire "digital universe" will grow to 40,000 exabytes, or 40 trillion gigabytes.

.
Click to expand...


No mention of WALL-E upgrades for Bad NAND strategies.
But here is a link to Facebooks video Demo of their Blu-Ray Robotic system:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152128660097200

The press releases are recent so google will bring up many more articles that might provide more in-depth??
 
Also sounds like they have some raid like redundancy over BR disks.

I have been thinking about that but it is a pain to do if you don't have free HD space for so many BR disk images.
 
farscapesg1 said:
As someone who is currently doing some spring cleaning and going through my collection of archived CDs/DVDs... I'm finding a large percentage of even the "data archival" disks are unreadable after 8-10 years of shelf storage. I guess it helps in the decision of what I "need" to keep... by not even being an option ;) Oh well, I'll be able to get rid of several CD towers in my office that have made several moves over the years.... and just replace them with a small fire safe and a couple of hard drives with important backups while everything also gets backed up to Crashplan...
Click to expand...

same here...

going through my collection of MAC cd-rom disk back-ups ( back then it was "sneaker-net" solution for television studio I worked at )
I seem to be recovering well over 90% of the disks so far. The other 10% seem to be lost to disks that r completely unreadable.
( with a few exceptions recovery attempts are resulting in all or nothing so far )
Considering the oldest disks from the late 90's are over 22 years old...
I was expecting corrosion by now but most failures seem to result from scratches??? Same damage type on any recent catalog in my back up library. Dependant on care.
When corrosion exists on the old disks... So far it seems more likely to come from a GOLD "colored" disk?...
 
Most of the unreadable disks should be from separation of the metallic layers, due to a reaction with materials inside the disk. You can buy whateverthatis-free blanks but they are expensive.
 
Hello again, BD-Rs and burner have been ordered thru amazon :) but HDDs will have to wait mainly because of their weak shock resistance over air, and HDDs prices being unreasonable in my country :/
Thanks to everyone who helped me make my decision :D
(oh and sorry I skipped out for a bit, I thought the thread would die after you answered my questions.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another question for those keeping up with eh thread tho :)

Is there any program that would list file names of the the files in a specific folder for me in a .txt or other text format?

You see I'm planning to have my blu-rays named alpha-numerically (A000,A001,...,B000,...,etc.) and to organize things I would have an online folder with a document for every disk containing the list of files inside of it, (A000:pokemon Season 1 <that would be the name of the document, and the files would be inside the document, for example when you open it: 1-episode 1 2- episode 2. etc.).
So is there anything that would list the file names for me to save me the time ? and if not how easy~hard would it be to write such software?
 
Never mind I found a solution, THIS.
Might not be the most feature-filled option but it does the job :)

Thanks again everyone, and goodbye.
 
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