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

[Bill Broadley]

Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> I *really* want disk storage that's larger than 4.7GB.

How old school.  Chasing piles of flimsy media that holds 1/20th of a hard
drive, need labeled, manually carried off site, cataloged, etc.  I've not seen
any media recently that made a particular amount of sense compared to a
just shipping friends/family an external 1TB drive and using something rsync
related (encrypted if you prefer).

Not to mention that if you actually burn regularly seems like many of the
burners don't have a particularly long life.  I recall a post from someone
running an apple lab that used burners daily and claimed that the drives died
between 100 and 400 burns... no idea on the failure mechanism, for all I know
cheap media was gumming up the works.

> disks appear to be in the 7-8 dollar range.

25 or 50GB?  In any case $0.15-$0.30, which doesn't sound too bad, till you
count labor cost, reliability, and that by nature burned media ends up wasting
quite a bit.  If you do 40 hours of work and end up with 1GB... do you burn a
disc?  Oh, er, 2 so you can have one offsite?  So you spend $15.00 a week to
have a reasonable chance of not losing a weeks work?  Will you even remember,
especially when busy?  Cron jobs seem to have excellent memory ;-).

$15.00 a week buys quite a bit of Amazon storage.  Say you have 100GB of
storage, and a churn of 1GB a week.  Amazon would charge $15.00 a month to
store 100GB, and $0.17 a week to let you upload 1GB.  For that cost you could
have daily backups with offsite storage for the grand total of zero minutes of
your time a month (once setup).... er, well you would have to approve your
bill.   At least for me, my most common restore is a single file/directory and
it's quite nice to be able to browser and click instead of digging around on a
shelf or drawer.

I suspect you could find something to do with the other $250.. maybe this is
all a justification for the ability to watch bluray movies ... or maybe you
like the smell of sharpies?

Robert Parker wrote:
> CDs are extremely fragile. The recording layer is on the top of the
> platter protected only by a layer of laquer which is easily
> contaminated by fingers touching the top surface. A DVD in contrast
> has the recording layer sandwiched between two equally thick
> polycarbonate platters and so is not subject to the same contamination
> as a CD. Otoh you can destroy a burnt DVD by dropping it on its edge
> on a hard surface which can cause the 2 platters to delaminate. I'd
> expect BlueRay to be at least as reliable as DVD

Why?  Same volume, higher density.  Any physical defect is going to damage
more bits.  I hadn't heard they added any extra ECC.  A DVD can take a fair
bit of abuse and still have a bit perfect read (assuming good software).  Even
cloudy DVDs with tons of scratches seem to often work.  2nd hand reports seem
to support more bluray problems with playback than DVD.

I'm concerned with planned obsolescence, every increasing layers of DRM,
quickly moving standards.  Buy an HDTV players it's "future proof", never mind
the HDTV standard, sure 1080P is nice, but I'm sure once the market saturates
they will be pushing 2160p... and of course hollywood is pushing 3D these
days.  Will computers come with bluray drives in 4 years?  Will you even be
able to buy media/readers in 8?  Do you ever in your life want to bother
migrating from a stack of media type A to media type B?

Seems like the industry is definitely trying to prevent long running standards
like the CD and DVD and consumers who considered their collections long term
investments.  Now they want new standards often and are pretty pushing for pay
per use, pay per computer, pay for a ring tone, pay per format.... alright
enough ranting.