Bluray writers and discs question

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chenw

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Oct 25, 2014
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Hey all,

I know I might sound archaic asking questions regarding Bluray burner, but I am currently investigating alternative media for storing data (specifically a collection of movie files). Because I am naturally a hoarder, I would like to keep them in a long term storage medium.

I had considered HDD and SSD, but I have developed an innate fear of having so much data stored on the same medium. Long story short, I had an old WD drive fail on me for no reason (suddenly developed click of death), and irreplaceable data was lost.

I have been trying to find something that would allow me to write a large quantity of data, but without the risk of terabytes of data suddenly lost due to a problem in the drive itself, so I have been looking up Bluray burners and drives.

I have several questions I was hoping if there are any old school experts on DVD-R or CD-R's.

1. Assuming that I store the discs in a safe location (IE safe from dirt and water), is there any chance for the data to be lost over time? I had always assumed not because the data is recorded physically, not magnetically, onto the discs.

2. When I was looking for Bluray drives, I noticed that while drives go all the way up to x16, discs only support up to x6. Does that mean I am completely limited to x6 writing speeds, or would I be able to write at speed faster than it says?

3. What brand of burner is considered most reliable for burning, assume cost is not an issue? And is there significant reliability difference between external and internal bluray burners? I was thinking that if discs can only support up to x6 speed, I may in fact get an external drive to put some more use into the drive itself, but I am not sure if there will be any burning reliability issues.

Thank you for reading through my long post, and I apologise, I tend to prefer posting long questions to get best informed answers.
 
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Do a search for "bit rot" - even optical media is not immune to aging issues. If you have precious irreplaceable data, use quality blank media and make redundant backups. I have maybe 10GB of genuinely irreplaceable data and I have at least three copies of it at any one time: one on my main PC, one on a different PC and a third on an external HDD for offline storage. Some of them are also backed up on DVD-RAM or USB drive.
 
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Yeah, I will be backing up the truely irreplaceable data on multiple sources.

The reason I have considered Optical media for archiving purposes was mainly that the Storage medium and the data extractor are completely seperate components. IE if the disc lasts longer than the drive, at least I can buy a new drive to extract the data. After archiving the data there may be extended periods of time where I may not use it again, so I figured Bluray have a greater chance of surviving (the drive does not, I can always get a new one) than a HDD surviving in both the data AND the components.
 
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you'll find more extensive answers over on avsforum.com, an audio/video forum
Probably the biggest degrading factor to disc longevity is UV light - so best storage would include a lightless cabinet. Some of the forum members over on avsforum are current or retired tv production engineers, and have stated they've got blu-ray discs that are near 10 years old and still good. A big caveat is be sure to use quality mfgr discs - again, avsforum is a wealth of info in that area. Short answer, verbatim or TY discs, and the AZO coated discs - quality verbatim blu-ray single layer discs (23 GB), last time i checked were running approx 80 cents a disc. An economy line that has proven consistent quality is Optical Quantum, about 50 cents disc.

on burners - i'm using a LG WH14NS40 - and you're correct, except for some unique toshiba blu-ray discs that claim an 8X burn speed, the usual speed is 6X. However, depending on the movie, i may burn as slow as 2X for a better quality burn. One note, before i knew better i was using a laptop BD burner (the slim 12.7mm burners) in an external enclosure, and couldn't get more than 1 out of 6 Optical Quantum disks to verify after burning. I swapped to the full size 5.25" LG blu-ray burner above and now get 100% of the disks verifying. The theory is the slimmer burners are not rigid enough (ie the chassis) to track the disc as accurately. However, oddly, the verbatims would verify at nearly the 100% rate in the slim burner - go figure.

LG makes some decent burners, and for the money what most of the video enthusiasts over on avsforum seem to prefer - they replace them every 2.5 - 3years, whether they need it or not, and to be frank, my LG only ran $47 shipped, so it's not a major expense. The hardcore guys on avsforum have movie collections that run 12,000 - 15,000 movies, and they actually store them on BD or DVD discs, in white paper envelopes in a darkened cabinet. The disk serves as the backup copy, with the library copy is on HDD. Personally, i store them on HDDs with a backup HDD - but i expect HDDs have a shorter useful life, maybe 5 years - i say five years as i've never had a HDD last longer. But HDD means easier and faster to copy the complete HDD to another HDD, whereas copying video discs will be time consuming.

I've got maybe 700 movies on discs, but burning a movie to disc, a BD file of 18 gb for example, takes me 18-24 minutes, then another 25-28 minutes to verify, so it's time costly (to me) to use discs for my backup copies. Plus when you do the math, per GB of storage, HDDs at $25-30 per TB, work out cheaper.

spend some time reading the posts over on avsforums - there's a lot of info over there on this subject

fwiw
 
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Thanks for that, I will go to the forum sometime and check it out.

Well I just got a Pioneer BDR-X09XLT internal drive, since I found out that it would be cheaper for me to buy an internal burner and an external reader than it would for me to buy an external burner (I will only use the external burner elsewhere maybe twice a year, and will most likely be just reading, no burning).

One of the local stores stocked Panasonic blanks, so I bought 10 just to test (those were imported so they were much more expensive than brands found locally here). I bought them loose, but the spindle that the discs came out of was brand new (I saw the retailer removing the packaging in my plain sight). Too my horror, my burner software (ImgBurn) dates that particular disc to 2007, that's 8 years old...

I am going to double check the other unopened spindle see if I can put a more recent date, but when the spindle didn't look old, it almost certainly didn't look like it's been sitting on the shelf for 8 years, the gloss on the plastic packaging was still there.

Haven't burned anything yet, have been spending some time compressing the videos so they fit on 1 disc.
 
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This doesn't make sense Sir, you just talked about at length some price-less data, and now you are putting a price on it, and not that much either. Unload a practically new burner on eBay? hey tons of people are looking for deals.
 
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I wasn't putting any price on anything, I was just saying the burner I have bought didn't support burning M-Disc, I didn't even take that into consideration when purchasing the said burner because I found no M-Discs available online in my country, and the retailer that I had bought Panasonic BD-R's had put the M-Disc in a rather obscure location (in fact, I only asked about the price, I didn't even double check if the M-Disc in question was DVD or BD-R as I was leaving in a hurry).

I will see about selling my new Bluray, but that's on the condition that I find a retailer that sells M-disc compatible Burner, not many sell burners and even fewer sell discs (I avoid online stuff whenever and whereever possible, be it buying or selling, I don't trust the post office). I was very surprised that I was able to find a retail that stocked anything besides Melody BD-R's in the first place, much less M-Discs. It never occurred to me to even ask about M-Discs.

Besides, I also wasn't going to put my priceless data on ONLY BD-R, I would have several copies elsewhere, but I wanted a medium that didn't dependent on the drive itself functioning.

EDIT: I just read on M-Disc website that while M-Disc DVD requires a specialised burner, M-Disc BD-R does not, it was specifically designed to be within normal BR specs. So I will go back to them this weekend and buy a few if they are M-Disc BD-R's. Though from the price they quoted me, I am guessing it's M-Disc DVD's.
 
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Ok, doing some more research turned up the following:

1. The stamp date on the media (2007 date I mentioned earlier) is in no relation to its actual manufacturing date, apparently (club myce forum have stated that they have never seen a non-2007 stamped Panasonic disc). Even if it did it seemingly wouldn't matter on the overall quality of the disc if it burns well, and the few I did burned well.

2. I will probably keep my Pioneer burner. Despite that it cannot burn M-Disc DVD's, and cannot do Disc quality scans, it can burn BD-R M-Discs, and they are only twice as expensive ($3.50 vs $7 per disc) for massively bigger capacity, and I probably won't burn great many M-Disc's anyway, so I will burn all important data on BD-R M's rather than DVD-R M's.

I managed to score a spindle of 30 Panasonic 25GB's for about $30 here, which is somewhat a bargain. The only discs that are cheaper are Verbatim's LTH discs (not as reliable as HTL discs), or the local Ritek or melody discs, both of which are not that great, so I might snatch a couple more spindles.
 
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i've been using Optical Quantum BD-R discs now for quite awhile, and especially using the 4X disks, have not had a disc that didn't verify - generally i find them on amazon at $0.50 per in spindles of 50. I just did a quick check on amazon and they, at the momemt, not available, but i'm pretty sure that's temporary. The 6X disks were there, at $.050 per.

One of the users over on avsforum.com, a retired tv production engineer, first recommended them, indicating he'd been using them since they first came out, burning 350-400 disks a year. Using the various mfgr identification utilities out there, they show to be Phillips mfgr. The 6X run a bit more but mfgr has never been identified.

Here's a link to DVD Identifier 5.2.0 that i've been using http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/dvd_identifier.html
 
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Yeah I had a look into the brands available here in Taiwan, unfortunately Optical Quantum is not imported by any vendors at all, and the price of import would pretty much negate the cost savings (the shipping cost nearly as much as the spindle itself lol). At the same cost per disc I went with Panasonic. Verbatim also had HTL discs, but they were more expensive than Panasonic, and they are rare. LTH discs are a lot more common. We have quite a few other brands available from online vendors, however Optical Quantum is a bizarre and odd absentee.

These were the discs I used.
http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-Blu-ray-Recordable-Spindle-Printable/dp/B005RY6JCC

These are, AFAIK, one of the top dogs in BD-R single layer in terms of burn quality. Verbatim Blue label HTL is also very good.

The Ri* and CMC are a totally different story. It would seem that Ritek discs are quite poor, and CMC is getting better. The salesmen here in Taiwan (Ritek and CMC are both Taiwanese) seem to think in completely opposite...

Did a couple of BD-R DL to see how DL burns, unfortunately not in the way I liked: it burns all the way to the edge of one layer, switch layer and back again, which I didn't like because errors usually occur at the outer edge of the disc. I burn my 25GB discs only to 20GB to avoid that edge degradation. And turns out that 1 Ritek BD-R DL costed the same as 2 Panasonic BD-R, I found no reason to use DL.

I am contemplating on whether to try cheaper discs (Plexdisc seems to be quite nice and they are priced quite well, they are selling for around 50c per disc like Optical Quantum), or just keep buying Panasonic discs. I am not so much after cost saving but rather after reliable discs. I am hoping the discs will last long enough that an alternative form of storage comes along to replace those discs.
 
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didn't realize you were Taiwan based - i'm an old fart, and keep subconsciously assuming the web stops at the US borders, lol

do a search over on that avs forum i linked to - there are a couple of threads discussing the quality of different disks, and your assessment on verbatim LTH discs is spot on
 
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