BD for Data
The Information Week posting Blu-ray Basics: Using The High-Definition DVD Format On Your PC asks the question
Now that the war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray is over and PC makers are adding Blu-ray as a regular option with new systems, people are asking: What’s the big win with Blu-ray?
The first half of the posting discusses Blue-ray (BD) video playback and copy protection issues. My primary interest is Blue-ray for data. The second half of the posting discusses this topic.
BD for Data
(Credit: Lite-On)
The primary question is BD worth the price? My answer is no. I won’t be investing in BD technology any time soon.
The first and most major outlay of cash is, of course, for the drive itself, and right now the least expensive Blu-ray burner drives weigh in at something like $400. NewEgg.com features a Lite-On model for that much; Sony’s own Blu-ray disc burner comes in at a wallet-shredding $600.
The question isn’t whether or not the costs will come down on these drives — they will — but whether they’ll come down in a timely enough way and to enough of a price point that it wouldn’t simply be more economical to buy one or more external hard drives to get the same storage space at a better price premium. Then there’s the question of the cost of blank media. At NewEgg.com, a blank single-layer (25-Gbyte) Blu-ray disc costs anywhere from $10 to $14, depending on which manufacturer you choose. A dual-layer (50-Gbyte) disc is only around $16, so if your drive can write to dual-layer media, there’s little point in buying single-layer discs since you can double the capacity for only a few dollars more.
This works out to about $0.32 a gigabyte. (Not all drives burn to dual-layer BD media, which is another gotcha.) There’s also the possibility that future iterations of writeable BD media could contain more than just two layers (Sony has talked repeatedly about 200-Gbyte discs being a possibility), but there’s no guarantee such discs would be compatible with existing players.
At current market prices, assume $600 for a dual-layer drive and $16 for each piece of 50-Gbyte media. Compare that to a 500-Gbyte SATA hard drive from Western Digital, which retails for $100 — that’s $0.20 per gigabyte. To get the same price per gigabyte for BD, you’d have to discount the cost of the drive entirely (for instance, if you were buying it anyway as part of a system) and have blank dual-layer media drop to $10 a pop.
On the plus side, a BD drive means being able to add storage in 25 to 50-Gbyte increments without having to buy a whole new drive. It’s in many ways a redux of the same dilemmas that cropped up when DVD and CD drives themselves first appeared.
Instead, I’m more tempted to sink money into a Drobo.
Drobo
(Credit: Drobo)
This storage device delivers a practical way of keeping up in the never ending storage race. When one of the drives is filling up, the green light next to it turns yellow. The light turns red when data is not save on the drive. Simply pop the drive out and replace it with a larger one.
When Drobo is full, simply replace the smallest drive with a larger one. Cool!
…John
