Verbatim 43614 BD-RE Rewritable 25GB Blu-Ray Disc Jewel Case

AlanMusicMan

at 12:44 pm

I wrote the original review of these excellent products in

Feb 2008, however, it’s now September 2009 and – about 18 months on – prices of

these discs have not significantly fallen, but in that same period other

technologies have got a LOT cheaper and considerably more capacious.

Consequently, your reviewer believes that we have crossed a Rubicon… let me

explain!

(Note: If you

only came here to find out about the Blu-Ray discs – scroll down to

“Original Review”)

If you’re reading this, the chances are you have a lot of

data to store. Since video is the “fattest” data type, you probably

have lots of that, or possibly you have enormous amounts of audio or perhaps

hi-res images. In short, you have a data storage problem to solve.

We’re now seeing mainstream hard drives from Seagate,

Samsung and others offering 1.5 Terabytes (that’s 1,500 Gigabytes or 1.5

MILLION megabytes) offered for a delivered cost well under £100. At the time of

writing, Amazon is offering Samsung Spinpoint 1.5TB drives for £80 – delivered.

Each of these hard drives will hold the equivalent of 60 of Blu-Ray discs, or

30 if you’d prefer to compare the later dual-layer Blu-Ray discs which can each

store 50GBytes each.

60 x Blu-Ray discs, even at the best prices available today,

will cost you about £5.10 delivered cost per disc, or £306 for the lot. If you

used dual layer discs you’d be paying about £8.90 delivered cost per disc, and

therefore paying £267 for 30 of them. Using conventional shelving (CD format

wall shelves) 60 discs will occupy a space around 33″ (84cm) wide by

6″ (15cm) high by 6″ (15cm) deep.

So, for the Blu-Ray side of the equation, we have a minimum

purchase cost of about 17 pence per gigabyte, and for our 1,500 gigabytes on

dual layer Blu-Ray we’d need a physical space of about 594 cubic inches. We

might also factor in the amount of time it would take to write these discs –

but that’s widely variable by writer, by system and by Blu-ray brand, so let’s

leave that aside.

On the hard drive side, we have a purchase cost of £80 which

gives a cost per gigabyte of about 5.3 pence per gigabyte. When inside the

anti-static plastic cases in which they are supplied, each hard drive measures

7″ (about 18cm) long by 5″ (12.5cm) wide by 1.5″ (35.5cm) deep.

That’s 52.5 cubic inches. Since we only need one, that’s the amount of space

that the hard drive version of our 1.5TBytes of storage will occupy.

For the Blu-Ray discs you would need a writer, and this will

cost about £140 delivered. To use the hard drive as plug-in storage for your PC

you would need a SATA hard drive docking bay that will cost you about £35

delivered.

So the headlines are: The Blu-Ray version of 1.5Terabytes of

storage will cost us more than 3 times as much to buy, involve equipment that

costs about 3 times as much and occupy more than ten times the amount of space

in our home when we have it.

But of course, that’s not the whole story… there are the

issues of longevity and accessibility.

Pretty obviously, hard drives (with all their mechanical

parts) in daily use don’t last as long as optical discs stored on the shelf.

But, in this scenario we are looking at using hard drives as long-term offline

storage, we write our archive data onto them and then unplug from our system

and put them somewhere safe in their anti-static box, in much the same way as

we always have done with CDs, DVDs and Blu_ray discs.

There is surprisingly little information available on the

longevity of hard discs when used in this way: That’s probably because, in

consumer land at least, it’s only in the last year or so that it has been

financially and space advantageous to use them thus. What information there is

suggests that, if properly stored in reasonable conditions (avoiding extremes

of temperatures such as might be found in a loft or garage), a hard drive will

last a very long time, if not in daily use.

It’s easy to damage an optical disc by scratching it. Part

or all of the data on it can be rendered unreadable by such damage. Similarly

it’s possible to drop a hard drive and damage it, or to do bad things to it

such that the file system on it becomes corrupted and the files lost.

The risk of losing files is one you need to form a personal

view about depending on what you want to achieve. Are you building an archive?

(Keep everything, forever) or a library? (Keep things for a while but gradually

replace them with newer things). As with all backup schemes, it comes down to

the question of “What are you NOT prepared to lose”? The answer to

that question will show you whether or not you need to make dual copies.

As I said in my Blu-Ray review I always create two copies of

my Blu-Ray archive discs to guard against data loss, and when using a hard disc

based backup scheme (which, yes, I am now doing for some data) I do the same, I

write the same set of files to two hard discs as a safeguard and store those

hard drives in different places. Additionally I ensure that each “pair” of hard

drives is from a different manufacturer, if they were both from the same

batch of product that has obvious potential dangers. Of course, which ever

technology you use, creating two copies doubles the time and cost, but gives

reasonable peace of mind.

So, I think it’s pretty clear that we have crossed a Rubicon:

Pluggable Hard Disc storage now has to be the technology of choice for many

archive and backup needs. That’s not to say that optical disc storage is

obsolete, it’s still a good method for data interchange between systems and for

other purposes. But as a backup medium I believe it has been eclipsed. No doubt

optical storage will fight back with denser storage on newer formats, but with

hard drives now having such a commanding lead in price, performance and

footprint (and with 2TB hard drives on the slate for 2010) the next generation

of optical products would have to be pretty spectacular to get back into pole

position.

NOTES:

* If you go down the pluggable hard drive route, make sure that your operating system and the docking product that you buy provide full support for “hot-plugging” drives (i.e. inserting and removing hard discs while the system is running).

* Windows XP and Vista provide such support – but the additional hardware and its software driver must ALSO be Windows hot-plug compliant for it to work properly.

* BAD things may happen to your file system data if you don’t have the necessary hot-plug support.

=======Original Review

I was hesitatant in going Blu-Ray. I have used DVD recordable since its early days. I went through the buying cheap and nasty DVD recordables phase, and paying the price for that, in terms of discs I could not read only a few weeks after burning them. I then switched to using branded DVDs – which I have been doing for 5 years or more with very few problems.

The problem is that – as it gets ever easier to create digital data by the truckload (in my case by making lots of digital off-air TV and radio recordings) the once mighty 4.7Gbytes capacity offered by DVD Recordable now seems pretty inadequate. Even the 8.6GB dual layer DVD discs – which are actually pretty good now if you buy branded ones – don’t really solve the problem any more – especially when you consider the size of hard drives out there now – 1000GBytes for under £100, and 1.5TB drives on the way (August 2008) – sheesh!

Enter Blu-Ray (yes we got there! Sorry if you thought you’d wandered into the wrong review there for a minute or two!). 25Gbytes per disc – on a platter the same size as CD or DVD – seems like a dream come true. Here’s the good news: IT IS A DREAM COME TRUE!!

Seeing the ever rising tide of DVD recordables around me one day last year I got desperate! I did a little research and then, took a deep breath and ordered a Pioneer Blu-Ray writer drive and also a Lite-ON Blu-Ray reader (I always advocate making sure you can read written discs on a different drive to the one that wrote them – it’s a much more reliable check that just a verify pass on the same drive, which of course, can mostly read what it wrote – so can most doctors!).

Ever since I got and installed these drives (upgrading Nero to Version 7 which supports Blu-Ray as soon as you install the drive) I have been buying these Verbatim Blu-Ray recordables (and also a few rewritables). It’s been excellent, none of the hassle that I had in the early days of DVD with spoiled discs by the binload, in fact I have now written almost 100 Blu-Rays and NONE of them have failed – which to me is pretty impressive. Almost all of them have been these Verbatim products – but a handful were TDK ones – and they all worked flawlessly. FYI I use these discs as ROMS to contain flat video MPEG2 files – I am not using them as Blu-Ray entertainment discs.

Now, the bad news (don’t worry it’s not THAT bad!): It takes a while to write each disc. Well, the discs are mostly 2x discs and there’s 25GB to write – so do the calcs and you can see why. I usually reckon about 2.5 hours per disc with a verify pass on the writer. Then about 12-15 minutes on my other system with the Blu-Ray reader installed, to copy all the files off the new disc to a gash folder on hard disc – just to prove everything on the disc is readable.

I guess the other thing to highlight is the cost, though since I bought my writer last year writers have more than HALVED in price and these discs are down in price also and falling monthly – a little way to go to be on a pricing vs capacity par with DVD-R, but it’s getting there. I see some of the new drives are now offering faster write speeds too, so the time taken should begin to fall also. Dual layer Blu-Ray (50GB) is next and then – they say – dual layer dual sided (100GB). Hmm, heard all this with DVD and it was slow in coming. Anyway, 25GB per disc is fine for me – for the moment

If you are willing to spend money to solve a space problem then I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending these discs. If you’re thinking of going Blu-Ray check it out, it might be just the thing for you too.

Rating: 5 / 5