Blu ray burner

burners are too expensive to be cost effective/ time efficient to buy at a reasonable price - but a br player/ dvd burner combo can be reasonable... cant go wrong with plextor...

I agree with above poster. I have a LG-GGWh20l blu ray burner that reads hd dvds also. I caught it a screaming deal on ebay. Ive had it for about 7 months and Ive yet to burn one blu ray disk. Media cost too much when I have about 6 tb of space on my harddrives.

Just like my dude said just get a blu ray reader/dvd burner drive and call it a day.

For backups it's probably most cost-efficient to buy a 1-2TB drive, back your stuff on it, put it in a vacuum bag and freeze it. Sounds stupid, but probably not as much an exaggeration as you'd wish.

I think freezing it is a bit extreme but ya just get a large drive for backups. What I did for backups is create a RAID 5 on my system and that was only 200 bucks. I have 1.8TB of space out of 3 1TB drives. When I have a disk failure my stuff is still safe. Probably the best way to go for backups.

You have your answer for optical drives. It makes no sense to get a blu-ray burner.

Not to criticize the suggestion, but RAID 5 is not a "backup solution", it's a "fault tolerance" mechanism; the only thing RAID protects you against is drive failure. If you get get a virus, delete a file or destroy your OS installation (corruption or risky manipulation), RAID won't be of any help. However, RAID is mostly transparent, instantaneous (does not require any "job" to run periodically and any changes is "committed" as it is made) and can also provide increased performance (depending on the level).

In the end you want to check which risk is more important to you.