[vox-tech] Blu-ray: How crazy would I be if...

[Chris Jenks]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

> I *really* want disk storage that's larger than 4.7GB.
>
> I've been looking at Blu-ray, and thought maybe it's worth investigating.

   Maybe I've been extremely unlucky, but I've found optical media to be 
extremely unreliable when the whole disk has to read perfectly. It may be 
OK to have a few frames missing from a movie, but even just yesterday I 
had to finish an Ubuntu install by hand because the desktop files were 
corrupted on the CD.

   You could get 9GB by going to dual layer DVD, but I would recommend 
using USB hard drives for your storage. The cost should be no more than 
ten cents/GB (about the same cost as blu-ray), but it should be much more 
reliable and more versatile too since you can rewrite. I just bought a 
1.5GB USB drive at Fry's for $129 with no rebate. You could probably save 
slightly more by using an enclosure and internal SATA drives for storing 
data.