BD25 Prices Continue Fall

Yes, but a basic disc setup (as you describe) has no redundancy. Many low-cost redundant setups (like 'un-raid') are just above that, providing minimal protection.

I looked at it all, from small to very large systems, and found a system that provided enough drive slots that did two things: first, give one the ability to go with RAID6, and second, to provide goodly amounts of storage.

There are several systems in the 24+ drive range (so, 2TB drives, we're talking 44TB RAID6 array's), but are in the $10K+ range and have to be built to 100% from the get go.

I found one manufacturer,Thecus, where the number of drives (7), was highest, and it supported both RAID5/6. Therefore, one could build a 9TB RAID6 array for under $2K each, and simply stack them one upon another, building as your storage needs increased. And, the cost curve at the 'end point' equaled that of the 'superbig' boxes, 45TB at around $10K price point.

If one does the math, one can store some 360 BR discs (25GB ea) on each 9TB module, or at 35GB/ea, then 250. That works out to around $8/per BD disc (all depending on how large each disc is, of course). Pretty high compared to 'basic' discs, but it's RAID6 protected.

If one recodes it, though, the space can be reduced quite a bit (if BD25's, then almost half). I have one machine running doing that right now, and am bringing up another to more than double my output. But I have over 90TB of SD DVD's that I took some 7+ years to recode and burn, and figure that with HD, I'll duplicate that in about half the time. Once I get the production line going 100%.

So unless RAID array's and their drives drop even more (but I'll bet the burnable discs price curve will exceed that), burnable is the way to go in the long run. Not to say that some 90TB array wouldn't be nice, but at what price?
 
I do for long term archival like home photos and videos. I recently had my NAS go down with 2TB of data... that was the backup. Hard drives have an average life span of 3-5 years. After which they die with no warning whatsoever. And of course u have to keep backing/mirroring the data on hard drives.

I will prolly put all my imp data on few BD media.
 
'Defense in Depth' is the watchword on this stuff, and it really comes down to how much of a hassle you're willing to go through to 'reconstruct' what just took a dive.

I have a huge number of CD's I bought back in the 80's, way before cd burners, nice large cheap HD's, or even silicon USB sticks. I sat down with Winamp a few months ago, and crunched them all down to FLAC for storage on my RAID array. I'm still grinding my way through them converting to 320kb/s AAC for use in my car/USB. Now, losing all that work... is why they're on my RAID array.

I looked at unRAID for a couple months, but decided that recovering from any disc error was both a lot of work, IF it was recoverable at all (which it really isn't). I'll take RAID6, thank you.

As I said, I have over 90TB of SD/DVD discs (yes, over 8000+), and even though it'd probably take a few weeks to roll through them, I do pull things out at random, and it's extremely rare to hit something that has errors on it (it's happened once; managed to recover the disc and re-burn a new one). Probably because I always burned at half-speed (i.e., a 4x disc at 2x, 8x disc at 4x), and never skipped doing a full verification on any disc.

We'll see, of course, with BD25's. When I get up past 100 or so, without any problems, I'll post it here.
 
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