Where are you storing your HD's?

[DVD Maniac]

Hopefully this is the right place for this. I am interested to see if (like me) anyone else is avoiding High Def burns to optical disc at this stage as hard drive storage is by far the most cost effective.

Latest Comparison -

Cheapest Blu Ray Single Write 25GB £7-8 (SVP Comms)
1 Movie Backup!

750MB SATA 300 Hard Drive Typically £80-£90
Thats about 30 Movie Backups @ £2.60 each

To me its still a no brainer at the moment at judging by the rate blanks are falling (ie - not at all!) this situation is likely to prevail for some time. The downside is of course the need to buy new hard drives - but these can always be used for archving purposes at a later date.

[jeffy]

750 Gigabytes :)

EDIT:
The downside is of course the need to buy new hard drives
Buying/Storing 30 Blu-ray discs or a single hard drive...what's the difference?
What is the advantage? You can connect your hard drives easily and you don't have to buy a Blu-ray writer. Archiving to the hard drives is faster as well.

[DVD Maniac]

750 Gigabytes :)

EDIT:

Buying/Storing 30 Blu-ray discs or a single hard drive...what's the difference?
What is the advantage? You can connect your hard drives easily and you don't have to buy a Blu-ray writer. Archiving to the hard drives is faster as well.

Yes you are right. A cheap way of doing this is to use a SATA / USB adapter like the ones from Akasa which makes them hot swappable (providing you make sure you power down the drive properly first). If you can't be bothered buying one of these simply make a mod to your case and buy an extended internal SATA cable and power lead then you can swap round the drives without having to open the case (you have to power down your machine first of course to do this safely).

Prices for hot swapple external devices such are currently far higher so I have avoided this route for now. I am interested to see what happens when the e-SATA drives start to become more widely available.

Other advantages of hard drive storage -

1. One SATA drive is smaller than 30 optical disks taking up less space

2. No faffing around with dodgy media / failed burns / coasters etc etc which is the bain of the backup process

3. Easier to manage cataloging of your collection

4. Less likelihood of lost data. I have had one hard drive go wrong in 20 years but i have lost count of the number of optical discs that get scratched or become unplayable. Even if Hard drives go wrong you normally have a better chance of data recovery than you do with those flimsy optical discs!

With all the above in mind what is the point of optical backup at all? :rolleyes:

[QuadcoreHD]

There is no point in disc back-up. That is only for people authoring their own blu-ray discs from, for example, HD Camera footage they've taken themselves. I have no idea the cost of a dual-layer BD blank (can bd writers even write in dual layer?) but singles are like $20 bucks MINIMUM in the US. You may as well buy another copy of the movie as a backup in case your other copy becomes defective, its like $5 dollars more :P

PS. Im sure the movie studios would be your biggest fan if you did that :P