Blu ray media cost

[alidan]

i have decided to switch over to blu ray when the cost per gb meats the cost per gb of dvd, which is currently at about 5 cents a gb

this equates to 1.25 $ discs.

and even than i wont bulk buy (25-50) until they are under 75cents a disc and wont stock pile (500-1000) until they hit 30cents.

can anyone compare dvd cost over time to blu ray and see about when we should expect them to really come down in price

 

[huron]

That seems like a really difficult thing to predict. I'm not sure how anyone can tell you when the prices would come down...we'd have to have a really good knowledge/understanding of the market, the manufacturing process, etc.

I'd say it'll still take awhile, but have no idea on a timeline for you. Sorry...no crystal ball here

 

[RetiredChief]

My crystal ball clouded up and when the smoke cleared I say a face with a blank stare.

(1) Law of supply and demand - demand just not there, and may be a year downstream.
(2) Not until blu-ray recorders come WAY down in price. $30 for a DVD writer (9 gig Dual layer disk @ about a buck ea. and single layer @ about 20 cents - on sale. The Blu-ray recorders are overpriced. You can buy 2 750 Gig HDDs for the price of one Blu-ray recorder which is a better way of archieving data. My son bought a 2 TByte Raid0 storage array unit to archieve his Blu-ray collection.

I have 2 Blu-ray recorders (1 in each desktop) and I have 2 Blu-ray player/DVD recorders in my 2 laptops. And unless you have money to burn I still do not recommend them. To give you an Idea on mark-up in the US. I bought my first internal slimline blu-ray player/DVD recorder for $100 - It was a PATA version. My second laptop required SATA. This prevented just swapping them, so I looked for the SATA version - It was $200. BUT There is Very litle diff in Manuf cost!!!!. I ended up ordering from overseas (Tiawan, which is risky). Ended up great, airmaled at no cost by vender. Point is Mark-up.

 

[alidan]

when the recorders come down to 100$ area again, im positive the discs will too. to my knowledge the cost to make a bluray dics for burnable is close to the cost of making the dvd, its just the cost to get the tings to make it.

dvds became practical when the burners costed 70$, and once cds were all but phased out, the burners over took the players.

with the economy getting better, and bluray gaining strength, im thinking by Christmas the media itself may hit dvd media cost. especially with dvd media past its prime value (it use to be 17 cents a disc). i was just wondering if any one had projections based more on fact than mine.

and harddrive may be more cost effective, but i have 2 failing ones under 6 months old. and one under 2, with a dvd or bluray, its more of an all or nothing, than read will work for years, with a hard drive, the data will go on more reliably, but hell knows when it will die.

 

[RetiredChief]

alidan, you have some good points, But:
(1) I think you have been very unlucky with HDDs - I'm still using three Hdd that are approaching 20 years old. The only HDD problems I have incountered are the -OPPs (like dropping them/ or jarring them while on). Granted the newer HDDs are not as good as some of the older HDDs - One reason is density, the 2nd being the higher RPMs drives with less quality.
(2) the "Life span" off DVDs I think are over rated based on several articles I've read. They are very much effected by envioremental conditions. Have you ever looked at the errors (correctable one) on a newly recorded DVD - it can be hugh ie 20,000 -> 100,000 errors and very greatly by disc manuf/batch. These errors are corrected when played back by the error correction scheme but over time can become uncorrectable.

A second option are the newer HD thumb drives, Capacity increasing and they are coming down in price. With the new sata3 standard they will become faster than most DVD drives which are limited by rotational speed. One draw back is that for long term archieving they should be refresed periodically ( not sure of freq/time frame). A 3rd option is SSDs WHEN they come down in price. Myself I now put my moves on a thumb drive and/or an 2.5 in external esata HDD for watching while on travel. Both of these can delay the reduction of recorable blu-ray disk, again law of supply and demand. It could well be that the cost will drop considerably, but it may be like laze disk players - it will occurr when they have become obsolete.

 

[leon2006]

>10 years...Adaption of Blue ray is slow. Everything about it is expensive.
Its a very reliable backup. I use branded disk for drive image file.

 

[alidan]

the newer a hard drive is the less reliable they are. i dont want to actively use a 5 year old hard drive, but i do.

and also, with dvds, i can back things i want up. and yea over time the discs die, i have had a few with uncorrectable errors, but in all honestly, losing 1 file on a 4gb dvd is FAR better than losing a a whole 250gb-2tb hdd.

with a hard drive, i have to have the internal one, and a back up of that internal, and with an external, a backup of that external. and to be honest, that would and does cost allot of money.

ssd, if i had the cash, i would only use them, because at the very least there is no failure because of moving parts.

i have always and because of 2 1.5tb hdd failures within 2 mounts of purchase, i will always trust disc based optical over spinning hdds.

and thumbdrives are only good if you dont need to store the data, but move it around and use it.

 

[sminlal]

I don't think BD-R disks are ever going to get to the same price points as DVD-R because I don't think the demand will ever be there. Optical media just isn't as important in these days of cheap external hard drives.

External drives are faster, and don't require all the handling that optical discs do. I use redundant hard drives for my archiving - they're way easier to use and every 6 months or so I can plug them in, fire up my checksumming program to verify that all the files are still readable, and walk away while it does it's work.

How many people with optical discs do you know that actually verify that their disks are all still readable?

 

[alidan]

I don't think BD-R disks are ever going to get to the same price points as DVD-R because I don't think the demand will ever be there. Optical media just isn't as important in these days of cheap external hard drives.

External drives are faster, and don't require all the handling that optical discs do. I use redundant hard drives for my archiving - they're way easier to use and every 6 months or so I can plug them in, fire up my checksumming program to verify that all the files are still readable, and walk away while it does it's work.

How many people with optical discs do you know that actually verify that their disks are all still readable?

i look at it this way.

losing 1 or 2 files on a disc, or a whole tb hard drive because of mechanical failure.

now lets assume that the best burnable blu ray are 100gb, 4 layers. wont happen for a long time, but 100gb a disc, and if every disc cost 10$ (bluray 1$ dual layer 3-5 and than 4 may be 10 im guessing) for normal file backup purpases that is more than a completely reasonable price,and even at double that price it still reasonable.

the one thing i love about optical media, is that after you burn it, and verrify that everything is readable, you can have some expectations that the thing will work for a while. where as a harddrive exturnam could fail at any moment. and any way.

right now i have a 120gb exturnal, that i know has files on it, and i can read partially so i know they are there with chkdsk, but i cant read them at all in windows.

some how magicaly, my 750gb exturnal isnt effected, but any other exturnal storage, harddrive, thumb drive and 3 of the sd cards and one of the sony cards all say they are not formated, and are unreadable when i know for a fact they are.

 

[sminlal]

Optical discs DO degrade because the data is encoded in an organic dye layer which will, over time, fade. So you can't just assume the data will always be there. If the data is important to you, then you need to (a) burn two copies (which doubles your media cost), and (b) check every copy from time to time so that you can (hopefully) recover the data from the other copy if one goes bad.

That's basically the same thing you need to do with hard drives, but it's a lot more convenient (and currently cheaper) to do it with one or two hard drives than with dozens of optical discs.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you really need to check the quality of the burns you make. I have a lot of video archived on DVD, and one thing I've learned is that if the initial burn is marginal then it will degrade a lot faster. The following image is a bad burn that was scanned immediately after burning and then again 3 and 6 months later. The black line at 280 is the maximum acceptable error rate according to the DVD standard. As you can see, this disk, perfectly readable immediately after being burned, is well on it's way to becoming a coaster after only 6 months:
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r64/SMN-8711/DVD-Recorders/RITEKF1_2007-02-06.gif

I do an error scan to check the raw error rates using Nero DiscSpeed. Only certain DVD burners can report raw error rates - I don't know the state of affairs for Blu-Ray burners but if you really plan on archiving data that way then I strongly suggest you check into this.