The question is as simple as that really. Are bluray disks the cheapest storage medium per gb?
I am recording video which is using about 32gb per day. So a month of that would be almost 1Tb. A year around 12tb.
I want to store at last a years worth with the possibility of more if needed. To me it seems that cheap bluray disks world be the cheapest solution.
But I wanted to get this confirmed.
32 Answers
Something to keep in mind:
A quick check of media prices shows BD-R disks for around $1 each--4 cents per GB.
Hard drives are easier to get a good measure of the price as pricewatch tracks them--2tb for $90. That's 4.5 cents per GB.
The drives are reusable, the disks are not. In either case you need some sort of redundancy anyway.
No, BluRay isn't the cheapest; tape is. M-Disc would be a better choice than BluRay.
A 10TB hard drive is less than 4¢ per GB, and has a reasonably fast access speed; also to be considered is ease of software backup and disk swapping. A 10TB HD >= 80 BDXLs, if you could write one disk in two hours (and come back to swap, label, put away; without error) that's a weeks work (24 hours/day).
It's much easier to install a drive, make a backup, uninstall the drive, and place it in a safe; than to swap all those disks. The write and read speeds are also much better, along with the convenience of having an entire backup on one disk, rather than having to figure out which set of BluRays holds the revision of the backup you wish to restore (or data you want to compare).
Huge capacity tape is also used for large capacity, but while the tape is relatively inexpensive the drives are not; small tapes (cheaper drives) lead to more swapping.
Media cost isn't the only cost. There's drive cost, convenience (time / effort), longevity (of drive and media, along with the format Standard) software availability / variety - all to be considered for the total cost.
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