Pioneer releases new Blu-ray burners – focus on long term storage

Oh great - the "disks last at least 50 years" claim.

You forgot to mention that these discs are almost impossible to find and also hugely costly

Geno, and you and I are both too kind to mention that batches of disk blanks will differ, manufacturing compositions will change and the likelihood of finding This One Original Batch Of Tested Disk-Blanks in even the 6th month of production - much less 2 or 5 years later - will be closer to "Zero" than any other number.

We're both too kind for that. Thanks for not bringing it up.

(Oh. And don't ask if, in the year 2062, what the quality assurance program is like.)

Say n'more, say n'more... nudge nudge, wink wink.

"BDR-PR1M is able to check the recording quality of the discs burned with the drive with special software".
mediatek chipset?

The NEC (now Renesas) SCOMBO chipsets were also able to scan discs.

it could work

Let's do a bit of math.
$100.00+ for the drive
$40.00-$50.00 per 100 gig disk.
Best case scenario is the first Terrabyte of storage is going to cost you $500.00.
A 1 terrabyte external hard drive is selling for $90.00-$100.00
Optical disks seem to be a technology to be filed next to 8track tapes.

If they don't get the price down for the discs the technology won't ever be used. as it is, you could probably find $500 1tb SSD drives pretty soon on the horizon due to competition and NEW players in the flash market.

Who's gonna keep checking on obsolete technology 50+ years from now?
You can BARELY still find VCRs anymore in society some 25+ years after CDR and 20 years after DVD hit the scene. BDXL discs are an entirely new process of which I think they don't utilize organic dye in the traditional sense.. the substrate are built into the plastic polycarbonate itself which is then etched by laser at a MUCH hiiger power than even blue ray itself, IIRC. Similar discs of "HIGH DURABILITY" also exist for DVD standartd too!

When (my 2013 price targets) run of the mill blu ray are $40 for oem drives and 25 cents for SL BD-R. in volume of 100 discs-- that's plenty of backups to chase down dozens of years that BD stays relevant vs a $50 single disc.Early adopters get burned with the high initial costs however, BDXL's future is not certain based on the trajectory of SSD, FLASH drives and REMOTE STORAGE in a vastly internet connected world. Industry will be crying out of 10, 50, 1000 times the storage BDXL will be capable of.-- and the only ones saying MAYBE are the hard drive industry..

I've got some burned cd-r's from around 1998 that still work fine 14 years on. I can't be bothered checking on them in another 36 years though.
I can't see the world lasting another 50 years anyway.

This also reminds me of the recent thread about the Japanese producing a cabling system that offering great improvements.

And then the very sharp remark: "If it was a breakfthru, they'd do it on existing cabling!"

Because, indeed, the Media ends up being the choke-point.
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7084/7...bd847805_z.jpg

Hard drives are selling for peanuts. I just bought a 3TB WD external last week for $140 and it runs cool and quiet. Who needs to store on optical? Get two HDDs and be done with it.

Storing data on hard drives is't funny while you have to pay the energy bills and migrate your data every 5 years. While we do not need to have our data in the second storing on blu-ray is perfect.
We have to keep our data for at leas 25 years, so you need to migrate your data 5 times. On the blu-ray drives my data will be safe for 25+ years using the special panasonic discs. This safes us bilions of zeny's archiving petabytes of data.
For now we do not know any method more reliable and cost efficient but let me know if there is a bether way to archive our data.

About the BDR-PR1M. We got one this week for some test while the BDR-206 we always used is hard to get these days. Came some (2) test Blu-ray's with it from Mitsubishi Verbatim of 100GB but wasn't able to burn them yet. Price was kind of scary, € 2000+ With the high price of the 100GB discs I'm afraid we have to use the 25-50GB discs for a little longer.

I think hard-drives would be more efficient and less costly although, as you mentioned, running them constantly would be an expensive consumption of electricity. But so would running all those optical disks, too. But no one would do that. They'd file those away. Just like I could 'file away' my hard-disks.

Long-term hard disk storage presents two issues to me: (1) I want to have a backup drive, too, perhaps using an identical drive-model, and I'd store them a distance from one another (to prevent a single fire, a single theft, a single natural disaster from claiming both.

And (2) hard drives can store tens of thousands of files. How do I keep an accurate and correct catalog?

Then, there's hardware obsolescence. Every ten years or so, I'd probably need to migrate the data from one kind of hard-drive to the next generation. Ten years ago, the SATA hard-drives were becoming common, but the IDEs (from 1993 onward) were common enough.

Today, there are few modern motherboards sold with IDE connectors (ASRock has some, but I suspect this will be the last year those will be available).

We might have motherboards, in 2023, that accept SATA connectors, but perhaps not.

So, would I need to store a running computer to host those various hard drives? Sure, why not? If a newer archival drive failed, then perhaps I could power-up an original computer and connect it to those drives.

I think HDD connectors and limitations aren't any more prone to change (obsolescence) than Optical Drives because they share the same connectors and electrical requirements.

But I'd always want "one more backup copy" somewhere.