Blu-Ray

[wolfnowl]

Hi Folks:

The September issue of Rangefinder magazine has an article titled, "Is Blu-ray Ready for Storage?"

You can read the .pdf from here.

Mike.

[Gemmtech]

NO WAY, not until they prove that my 50GB of data is safe for years to come and can't easily be damaged.  Plus they are slow devices.
I can't believe this media is the future.

[BernardLanguillier]

What I currently do:

- Main storage: SCSI320 Raid 5,
- Back up: NAS Raid 5,
- Safety backup: 50 GB Blue Ray

Cheers,
Bernard

[Josh-H]

Personally, I wouldn't touch Blue Ray as a long term storage medium.

Sony developed it with pretty much the sole purpose of being the last optical disc format delivery system for Hollywood. It was designed from the get go to to out perform and outsell HD DVD - the market being soley Hollywood. Data storage never really entered the equation. Its only offered by default.

Its quite clear that there will not be another optical delivery format as far as Hollywood is concerned - it will be solid state or direct download (the later being Hollywood's strong preference - where they can far better control what 'we' have access to). ITunes already delivers this successfully to apple TV owners and other website subscription services follow a similar paradigm.

Blue Ray (as much as I love the HD quality - and I really do - I own more than 100 BD discs) is not here to stay - its an interim format to fill the gap between truly useful downloadable HD content for the masses. Blue Ray (or BD) is akin to laser disc - the best possible way to deliver a movie in the home today - but far from a mass market delivery system, and even further removed from a long term storage solution.

As a long term storage medium  Hard drives are a far better choice for long term operability. Copy to a hard drive and then take that drive offline.

[Ray]

Once again, opinions on this matter will vary according to personal experience with optical discs. I've experienced in the distant past, problems with new CD/DVD readers not being able to handle some of my previous recordings. I've had the experience of believing I'd made a successful recording, only to discover a short time later that it hadn't been successful, perhaps because I hadn't taken the trouble to verify the recording because I was in a hurry.

However, I've never come across any CD or DVD that I knew for certain was readable after I'd recorded it, that is now unreadable, even after 15 years. My first CDs of my Kodachrome slides were recorded by Kodak. They're all still completely readable. And why wouldn't they be? No moving parts, and completley sealed with a protective layer.

I suspect that some folks sometimes blame their own incompetence at the recording stage on the soundness of the medium; a bit like kicking the cat.

[Jack Flesher]

Personally, I wouldn't touch Blue Ray as a long term storage medium.

+1.  For the costs, I'd rather have triple redundant hard drives stored in separate locations.  Oh wait, that's what I already do

[Jeremy Payne]

I use a FW RAID 0 for my working files ... I mirror that locally on a RAID 5 NAS ... which gets regularly archived to hard drives I only bring online for archiving ... the archive is made of incremental backups.

Next step is to get a second location involved.

[Gemmtech]

Once again, opinions on this matter will vary according to personal experience with optical discs. I've experienced in the distant past, problems with new CD/DVD readers not being able to handle some of my previous recordings. I've had the experience of believing I'd made a successful recording, only to discover a short time later that it hadn't been successful, perhaps because I hadn't taken the trouble to verify the recording because I was in a hurry.

However, I've never come across any CD or DVD that I knew for certain was readable after I'd recorded it, that is now unreadable, even after 15 years. My first CDs of my Kodachrome slides were recorded by Kodak. They're all still completely readable. And why wouldn't they be? No moving parts, and completley sealed with a protective layer.

I suspect that some folks sometimes blame their own incompetence at the recording stage on the soundness of the medium; a bit like kicking the cat.

Well then that must mean all optical discs that were readable once always are because you say so?    Certain optical discs used dyes that broke down after so many years and that's what made some of them unreadable.  You can even see the disc peel, I  have some I can dig out and post pictures of what happens to them.  Oh, and it isn't a question of opinions, these are well known and established facts.  Gold never breaks down and these discs seemingly last forever, but what is forever?  NOTHING.

[Jack Flesher]

Well then that must mean all optical discs that were readable once always are because you say so?  

Perfect!  

IMO one thing is for certain: just like with hard drives, optical disks will remain readable until such time as they don't. And it's a certainty there will come a time when they both don't.
~~~

Other thing is cost:

LG mid-line internal Blue Ray burner, ~~ $179.  10 pack of Verbatim BD-R DL (50G per disk, so a total of 500G storage) $150. === Total investment, ~~ $229.

Simple USB SATA2 drive connector, ~~ $29.  Samsung 500 G hard drive $50.  === Total investment, ~~ $80.

[BernardLanguillier]

As a long term storage medium  Hard drives are a far better choice for long term operability. Copy to a hard drive and then take that drive offline.

Yes and no. HD are certainly easily to migrate to a more recent technology when the needs arises, but there is a significant possibility that most PCs will be unable to connect to a SATA 1GB disk in 10 years from now. Besides HRs are intrinsically more prone to external influences than optical disks, think of evaporation of lubricants, internal corrosion, mechanical failures, violent large scale magnetic storm,... granted the risks are low but not nill. HDs are designed to be used intensely for a few years, not to sit idle on a shelf for a long time.

Cloud storage might be a better long term option since they will be dynamic systems morphing into one another while sticking reasonnably close to the forefront of technology. I would not trust clouds as my only storage option though. Coulds obviously pose some security concerns since a serious breach would make a lot of data available for the offending party.

For now call me paranoid, but my personnal policy is to use different types of technologies in parallel, the old eggs/basket story.  Since all my easily accessible is already stored on HDs, I prefer to use something else for my third layer. I might add a 4th layer of remote HDs stored in a totally different location, but will not consider those safer than the optical disks.

When storing on BR, I use the best archival disks around, I currently believe that these are made by TDK.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Ray]

Well then that must mean all optical discs that were readable once always are because you say so?    Certain optical discs used dyes that broke down after so many years and that's what made some of them unreadable.  You can even see the disc peel, I  have some I can dig out and post pictures of what happens to them.  Oh, and it isn't a question of opinions, these are well known and established facts.  Gold never breaks down and these discs seemingly last forever, but what is forever?  NOTHING.

No. Wrong inference. I never believe anyone just because they say so. Why should I expect anyone to be believe me just because I say so? I only believe what makes sense to me and what sounds reasonable, and then only provisionally. It is a fact that I have never lost any data from an optical disc that I know was recorded properly in the first instance. It is a fact that I have lost data stored on a hard drive, more than once. I don't expect an optical disc to deteriorate whilst just sitting on a shelf, but I've certainly come across reports of so-called bit rot, peeling layers and chemical attacks from the adhesive of lables. There are always faulty products around, whether optical discs, cameras or hard drives. Bad news is generally more interesting than good news.

[Gemmtech]

No. Wrong inference. I never believe anyone just because they say so. Why should I expect anyone to be believe me just because I say so? I only believe what makes sense to me and what sounds reasonable, and then only provisionally. It is a fact that I have never lost any data from an optical disc that I know was recorded properly in the first instance. It is a fact that I have lost data stored on a hard drive, more than once. I don't expect an optical disc to deteriorate whilst just sitting on a shelf, but I've certainly come across reports of so-called bit rot, peeling layers and chemical attacks from the adhesive of lables. There are always faulty products around, whether optical discs, cameras or hard drives. Bad news is generally more interesting than good news.

Then why post anything or read anything?  Think about it, all of life and all information is that way if you want to get technical.  Toyota makes reliable cars, says who?  Ferrari's have a 2-4 year waiting list, says who?  Do you believe the man at the dealership because he says so?  How about 2 dealerships?  10 dealerships?  Miele makes quiet and reliable dishwashers?  Says who?  If we never believe anything anybody tells us then we would spend our entire lives researching every aspect of it.  I know for a fact that certain cds degrade over time because I have tested many brands.  I always checked my discs and I checked discs over the course of months and years just to see how well they held up.  I NEVER labeled a disc (except for Primera printers) never wrote on one and always verified the data.  I have NEVER had a Kodak or Mitsui (Mam-a) disc go bad, however I have had many other brands go south on me, same data burned at the same time by the same burner.  The fact is the CD has only been around since 1982 and cd burners have only been around since 1988 and really only "affordable" for the past 10 years.  CDs pressed at the factory are totally different than what a cd-r is and just a "little" research will show that certain dyes just didn't hold up well over time; YES, believe it or not just sitting there on a shelf they can and do go bad rendering your data worthless.  Yes, a disc could be good for 5 years and one day it's no longer readable.  I always used Plextor burners for many years the Rolls-Royce standard of burners.

I have lost data on hard drives, usb flash drives, microdrives, CF, CDs, and even tape.   Use enough computers and related devices and eventually you will have a failure with EVERYTHING.

I believe even MR had CD-Rs go bad and he had to go to his back up hard drive,  let me check.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/sm-05-09-04.shtml

OK, I found it

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorial...back.shtml#Note

"A Cautionary Note

A few weeks after publishing this article I received an e-mail from a customer, ordering a print of one of my photographs from 1999. It wasn't one of my more popular (or recent) photographs so it wasn't on my new storage system, one of the Firewire hard drives.

For some reason though (Murphy was at work — as always) I couldn't find the CD ROM on which it was stored. I told the customer that he'd have to wait a week or so until I could get to my archive CD, which is stored off-site at my summer cottage.

The next weekend, upon arriving in the country, I retrieved the disk and was stunned to discover that the disk was unreadable on my laptop's drive. Upon returning to the city, and many hours of fussing later (along with some luck), I was able to retrieve the file, make the print and ship it off to the customer.

But, this made me wonder about all of my CD ROM backups. I have more than 100. I checked every one and found that 3 of the 100 were either totally or partially unreadable. These disks were on brand name media (Verbatim and Maxell), and had been verified after burning. Fortunately in each case the files on these bad disks were also located elsewhere and so nothing has been lost. (That's a 3% failure rate in just a few years. How many more will have deteriorated by next year?)"

And that has been a common theme even if the discs were burned by "expert" CDR "Master Burners"      CDRs go bad, it's been proven by many people including myself, but hey anybody who has ever had a cdr go bad must have done something wrong?  If the disc was readable for 5 years what possibly could they have done wrong?  NOTHING, the discs go bad because the dyes degrade, YES, even if they are just sitting on a shelf in a climate controlled room.


"Bad news is generally more interesting than good news."  ABSOLUTELY,  When the WTC was standing 110 stories up in the air nobody cared what made them stay upright, but when they fell to the ground everybody wanted to know why did they collapse and so the contacted my best friend to find out.

[Ray]

Then why post anything or read anything?

There are facts, there are opinions and then there are scary scenarious which many of us revel in. It would not be possible to get accurate statistical information on the percentage of correctly burned optical discs that have been well taken care of, and stored properly after burning, yet which have subsequently deteriorated to the point of being unreadable. These discs are designed and made to last. If any of them doesn't, then one might reasonably deduce that the product was faulty, a result of poor quality control, a scam, a fraud, or that some other factor is responsible such as  faulty burning or poorly designed CD reader, and/or incompatible software.

As I recall from the incident of MR searching for an image stored on a CD-R which he found to be unreadable, Michael admited in a then current thread on the subject of optical disc reliability, that the CD-R in question had an adhesive label and that there was a possibility that some chemical in the adhesive had reacted with the protective layer on the disc. The issue of chemical adhesives on labels reacting with the CD coatings was raised even before the first CD-Rs were available. Some of the first music CDs suffered from this problem 25 years ago.

No medium is a totally reliable storage solution, but a medium that is compact with no moving parts would seem to have a convenience advantage to me.

[Gemmtech]

There are facts, there are opinions and then there are scary scenarious which many of us revel in. It would not be possible to get accurate statistical information on the percentage of correctly burned optical discs that have been well taken care of, and stored properly after burning, yet which have subsequently deteriorated to the point of being unreadable. These discs are designed and made to last. If any of them doesn't, then one might reasonably deduce that the product was faulty, a result of poor quality control, a scam, a fraud, or that some other factor is responsible such as  faulty burning or poorly designed CD reader, and/or incompatible software.

As I recall from the incident of MR searching for an image stored on a CD-R which he found to be unreadable, Michael admited in a then current thread on the subject of optical disc reliability, that the CD-R in question had an adhesive label and that there was a possibility that some chemical in the adhesive had reacted with the protective layer on the disc. The issue of chemical adhesives on labels reacting with the CD coatings was raised even before the first CD-Rs were available. Some of the first music CDs suffered from this problem 25 years ago.

No medium is a totally reliable storage solution, but a medium that is compact with no moving parts would seem to have a convenience advantage to me.

So, I ask again, why post or read anything?  How do you determine what is facts, opinions or scary scenarios?  Why don't you stick your hand in a flame?  If I was boiling water on a cooktop and took the pan off the surface and said "Put your hand where the pan was just sitting, would you do it?  HELL NO, unless you knew it was an induction cooktop.  

Yes, and the facts were and are that some discs manufactured with certain dyes had a much greater failure rate than others.  I know this because of doing extensive testing with various media myself.  If you are so confident that the discs will never fail then why have a backup?  I agree labeling and ink pens had their effects on the discs, but certain discs degrade over time just sitting on a shelf.  MR found he had 3 bad discs out of 100 at that particular time he checked, that doesn't mean more discs wouldn't fail later on.  I've had many discs in a controlled setting go bad and I still monitor them all.  Wouldn't it make you a moron if you didn't check your media?  And why would anybody check their discs?  Because of the many reports of people having discs go bad.  

What does that mean "These discs are designed and made to last."  last for how long?  What if they just didn't know?  Asbestos was made to insulate, however it ended up killing lots of people, nobody knew its' effects in the beginning.  As the CDRs fail we learn more which ones and why.  You can stick your head up your ass and ignore it or be very cautious.  Marie Curie loved the colors of radioactive isotopes which she freely carried around and more than likely she died of radiation poisoning, we now know today the effects of radiation on the human body; heck you can't even handle her papers today.

The discs were more than likely designed to last, but last for how long?  After the effects of the dyes longevity became known we realized that the discs weren't lasting as long as "They" thought they would.  It's idiotic to suggest that software would cause a disc to start just peeling.  

Inkjet printers were another product that were designed to making lasting prints, but some people found out that the prints would fade within months, even if the prints were made correctly.  The industry eventually switched to pigment based inks.  Just because something is designed to "last" doesn't mean it will and that doesn't mean it's a fraud.

"No medium is a totally reliable storage solution, but a medium that is compact with no moving parts would seem to have a convenience advantage to me."

You mean like a negative or slide?   Isn't ignorance bliss?  When you don't know and just don't understand than you don't realize what's up!

[Ray]

So, I ask again, why post or read anything?  How do you determine what is facts, opinions or scary scenarios?

That is the $64,000 question. There are no easy answers. Each person in life has to make his/her own assessment and judgement on what information is reliable and how significant and relevant such information may be to his own circumstances. I make an assessment that news in general tends to focus on the  bad and the sensational. Good news tends to be boring. One news item of a faulty CD that peels or is unreadable after a few years has more impact than any of the millions of potentially good news items of CDs that are still readable since the day they were recorded many years ago.

I can truthfully report that I have not yet come across any optical disc of mine, not one amongst the thousands I have recorded during a 12 year period, that has failed in any respect. Whilst some of those CDs are Kodak Gold, many are el cheapo, anonymous brands. But none of the blank discs have been bought over the internet. They have all been bought from bricks & mortar retailers with a reputation to protect.

However, I have over the years accumulated a huge stack of failed CD and DVD recordings. I've also experienced instances of an apparently successful recording not being able to be read on a particular CD/DVD drive due to some incompatibility issue. I also once made the mistake of not verifying a recording because I was in a hurry, deleting the data (RAW files) from my hard drive in order to create space, then discovering a short time later that some of the RAW files on the disc were not readable. But I made that mistake only once.

I rely upon both hard drives and optical discs for archival purposes, but I have more confidence in optical storage as a result of personal experience.

If that one disc that I hadn't bothered to verify because I was in a hurry, had been stored away for a number of years, I would not have remembered that this particular disc had not been verified. The fact it was not fully readable would then naturally have been attributed to the unreliability of the medium rather the unreliability of the recording process.

[Gemmtech]

"No. Wrong inference. I never believe anyone just because they say so."  Actually you do everyday, we all do everyday.  Every single time you cross a bridge, walk into a building, go watch a sporting event at a stadium, board a plane, ride an amusement park ride, turn on your laptop, board a train etc.  You are believing somebody just because they said so.  "Ignorance is bliss"

[Ray]

"No. Wrong inference. I never believe anyone just because they say so."  Actually you do everyday, we all do everyday.  Every single time you cross a bridge, walk into a building, go watch a sporting event at a stadium, board a plane, ride an amusement park ride, turn on your laptop, board a train etc.  You are believing somebody just because they said so.  "Ignorance is bliss"

Incorrect. In all these instances I make a rational decision that the chances of things going wrong are so small I can ignore the risk or consequences. But I'm very aware that things can and do occasionally go wrong. Do you think I ask the pilot before I board a plane, if it's safe?

[Gemmtech]

Incorrect. In all these instances I make a rational decision that the chances of things going wrong are so small I can ignore the risk or consequences. But I'm very aware that things can and do occasionally go wrong. Do you think I ask the pilot before I board a plane, if it's safe?

You are completely missing the point.  Why ask the pilot if the plane is safe?  He wouldn't know, he'd only know if he were in condition to fly the plane safely.  

When you (ALL OF US) originally purchased your 1st CD burner you were taking the word of someone carte blanche (unless of course you were the engineer(s) who designed it) that the unit would work, that you could in fact burn a CD and have it last for a very long time.  Whether it works or doesn't you are believing somebody unless you do all your own testing and then it doesn't tell us how long a product will last and that's where we are at with CDRs, we know some of the dyes break down a lot quicker than others while the Gold seems to last, however there are certainly lots of reports of even Kodak Golds failing.  It works both ways, you believe in somebody that a product will work why not when it doesn't?  Ford made the Pinto and we all found out it didn't work as advertised, why is it so difficult for you to believe CDrs might not work as advertised either?  

[Ray]

Ford made the Pinto and we all found out it didn't work as advertised, why is it so difficult for you to believe CDrs might not work as advertised either?

It's not difficult at all for me to believe that anything and everything does not always work as intended by the designer or manufacturer. I'm talking about the unreasoning emotional response to bad news as opposed to the reasoned response from statistical information.

The situation regarding the safety of flying is perhaps a good analogy. Almost every plane crash that occurs anywhere in the world seems to get global news coverage. Some folks are so emotionally disturbed by such news they will never, ever use air travel. They are scared witless.

If a so-called expert tells me that flying is statistically the safest of all forms of transport, I don't necessarily believe the person just because he says so. I use my nous and work out from whatever qualities of common sense I possess that airplanes are taking off every hour or every few minutes of the day from thousands of airports around the world and that the percentage of fatal casualities in relation to the total number of people who travel by plane is very, very tiny.

Similarly with optical disc media, the sheer quantity of discs being recorded around the world, whether CD, DVD or Blu-ray, is so huge, one should not lose confidence in the general reliability of the media as a result of a few isolated reports of faulty discs.

[mmurph]

This antecdotal stuff right now is rather pointless without data. Some statistical defect analysis is the only thing that is going to move that part of the conversation forward.

I gave up on CD's years ago after read failures. Whether it was drive problems, burn problems, media decay problems, whatever. To me cd's and DVDs just are not worth the effort for the relatively small size and tedious process of burning, along with the difficulty of finding files among stacks of disks. On fashon shoots I might fill 8 or 9 4gb CF cards per day.  So each one fits on a disc, then you burn 2 copies, etc. and wind up with 20 disks of just the RAW for that day.  
 
I started buying $30 hard disk drives on sale around 2000.  First it was 120gb drives, h
then 160, 200, and now 320gb. I would buy them where I could buy multiple copies at a time5 or more drives, rather than 1 off rebates.

I set up my computer with matching internal and external drives.  So I have a 320gb "Raw" internal drives, and a 320gb "Working" internal drive (along with an OS drive, a scratch drive, etc)

Those each get backed up to external SATA drives of the same size and the same name. I make a few copies at diffeent times. I usually swap out the drives and archive them at the end of the year.

I am in the process of migrating all of the old 120 and 160 gb IDE drives to a few 1TB drives for archive storage. The eSATA external drive enclosures are great. It is easy to slide the drives in and out of the enclosure, where the USB enclosure on the past were a bit more of a hassle.

The Hitachi 1TB drives that I am using were $65 recently after rebate. I am archiving everything since 1998 when I first went to all digital output (using MF film scans as input.). In 2002 I went to almost all digital capture.

The raw files and scans for that period will fit on 2, 1TB drives. Would have fit on a 1.5 TB, but I can add to the second drive. About the same for the working files after I cull the intemedite and not quite right edits.

Total hard drive cost is much less than negative files, hangers, and filing cabinets with no "backup" or fire prevention, etc.

I am also setting an Intel NAS box with 2.7 TB of storage to have near-line or on-line storage of all of the same files. The box has a Celeron processor and 512 meg of ram. It is very solid, quiet, cool with fans and hardware monitoring. It is also very fast and rock solid via gigabit Ethernet. It uses either RAID 1, 5, or 10 with 2 or 4 drives. I may hack it to run RAID 0 to get some extra speed and space. Though I am inclined to let it be, as it is really solid as-is, and it is nice to have no management overhead. No video, keyboard, or mouse. It boots in 1 mi ute, shuts down in 15 seconds. Remote access via web UI or Linux shell login (although that itself is a bit of a hack.

The box was $135 on sale, the 1TB drives at $65 each were $130 for 2 or $260+$135= $400 for a solid box with 4x1TB, yielding 2.7TB with parity data protection.

I am very, very happy with the setup. Kind of the opposite of a the old, very painful and tedious CD and DVD process.

Cheers, just the processs that really works for me! Sorry for typos, etc - on my phone.

Best;
michael