Panasonic bigwig talks up Blu-ray archival potential

We're chalking up the lack of Blu-ray archival talk to the ridiculous price of BD-R media, but now that prices are slowly but surely beginning to sink somewhat, it seems that Panasonic is taking advantage of the situation. Hiroyuki Hasegawa of Panasonic's AVC Networks Company recently stated that "from an environmental perspective, Blu-ray and other optical discs are promising for archival purposes." He delivered that quote while giving a seminar on the current state of digital archives, and he also made mention that Blu-ray Discs were superior to other media including HDDs and magnetic tapes in terms of "non-contact recording and playback, removability, random accessibility and long product life." Quite honestly, we have serious doubts that BDs are superior to HDDs in most situations, but Mr. Hasegawa pointed out that discs were better suited for "long-term storage of fixed data." Call us crazy, but we're totally waiting for the rebuttal here.

[Sonic Death Monkey Posted Mar 13th 2009 10:29AM]

Murph, in the archiving word, magnetic media is frowned upon. Worm technologies re preferred.

[Tsuyin Posted Mar 13th 2009 10:54AM]

Disc are better in the long term. I woulnd't trust my HDD.

[Leicaman Posted Mar 13th 2009 11:02AM]

Well, short of data being inscribed on a diamond built by carbon vapor deposition, it might be true!

Common sense doesn't always hold over the long haul. HDD life depends on how much it's used an all, but conventional wisdom that it would last longer isn't necessarily going to always be the case, any more than the superiority of CRT monitors to LCD monitors is the case (it's no longer true).

[mdntcallr Posted Mar 13th 2009 11:47AM]

well, I would like to see more data systems for Blu-Ray, but in order to backup data and say, move to blu-ray the data on a terabyte drive, they may need a multi-disc system.

i'd love a great data system on Blu-Ray, which with lower blank media pricing looks closer to happening.

to me the big issue is will they also allow BD-R to record video, it is frustrating that in the USA, there are NO blu-Ray recorders so you can backup content from your DVR.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 13th 2009 11:31AM]

This is one area where the massively multilayer Blu-ray discs could shine.

[MFM123 Posted Mar 13th 2009 12:03PM]

Retail discs (using dyes) are unlikely to be as universally usable or last anything like as long as a HDD.

A professionally manufactured disc (ie not the sort of retail blank media using dyes that we normally buy) might last better but by how much is open to question and obviously costs a hell of a lot more.

Besides, set against the cost per gb & and the (still) totally ridiculous price of Blu-ray burners, HDD is far and away the most cost effective option comnpared to any type of Blu-ray disc .

Then there's the not so small matter of discs becoming obsolete soon.

Flash is set (within 2 years according to the road-map) to offer 6 times the bandwidth of Blu-ray and up to 2tb and all in a much smaller package.

I'm looking forward to dumping all my bulky discs for a little book of flash cards
(and if flash prices continue to fall the way they have so far I won't even care if I have to have another little duplicate book of them as a back-up for any paranoia lurking).

[h0mi Posted Mar 13th 2009 12:39PM]

Here's my question. Archiving to DVD is dicey because different media has different shelf lives, and most media doesn't have very good shelf life- burned discs can start getting corrupted within months or after ~5 years. Is blu-ray plagued by these same issues?

I'm aware that DVD's problem stems from media quality issues but getting quality burnable media is, AFAIK challenging.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 13th 2009 3:41PM]

I don't know bout the Blu-ray, but once you look you will see that Archival quality DVDs are not like cheap ones. They have gold and silver in the Media to extend life and increase reflectivity for greater read/write compatibility, and a hard coating.

[naman Posted Mar 13th 2009 7:18PM]

I don't know about those fancy gold archival discs. I think it's mostly marketing.

When I researched storage options for digital photos/negative scans, the almost unanimous choice by photographers was storage on Taiyo Yuden brand CD-Rs(!), because they used high quality, long-life dyes. Even then, it was recommended that the discs be recopied every 10 years or so.

[brianbobcat Posted Mar 13th 2009 2:09PM]

Your hard drive will be empty after just 2 years if you just leave it on a shelf. It's almost guaranteed: http://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_hard_disk_warning.html This isn't some random guy spouting BS, he's highly regarded as one of the top guys in his field and the information about the hard drives themselves actually comes from a HDD manufacturer. Give it a good read and you'll understand why Mr. Hasegawa is correct in his assertion and why when multi-format-mayhem says "Retail discs (using dyes) are unlikely to be as universally usable or last anything like as long as a HDD." how wrong he really is. Right now, pros either use burnable media to backup files long term or a RAID solution that's always spinning (I know one editor who has a 160TB RAID 60 for his archival).

-Brian

[Bozster Posted Mar 13th 2009 3:44PM]

This is simply untrue. I have 5 or 6 hard disks that are mostly never used. They are on the shelf and I've had them for more then 2 years. The data is still there.

I don't have problems with people using Blu-ray recordables to archive but there's so many downsides to the technology that i simply don't see my self using it for anything other then some DVR like unit for shows or TV.

The size and access speed will always be inferior to other flash and hdd based solutions. Not only it will take you 20+ minutes to backup something to 50gb on BD-Rs but you will have to span it to several discs. It would take me 20 BDRs to backup my 1tb drive and it will take me about 400+ minutes. That's almost 6 hours and that's not including the fact that I have to prep my folders and files so it's somewhat usable to access via multiple BDRs. Let's not get into costs as well. These BDRs will cost me $200+ at the moment.

Unlike optical discs in general, the HDDs are fast, convenient access can provide fairly stable backup platform considering you don't push them and reuse them everyday. I would say they offer slightly worse or the same reliability then optical discs. Not to mention scratching factors on discs etc.

HDDs at $1tb can be found for $100 and under and are super fast and plug to any machine or computer. On the other hand BDRs you will still need to use appropriate drives and machines which is again an additional cost.

I really don't see why optical media is even being pushed anymore except for the fact that Panasonic obviously has clear financial benefit cause they'll be selling everyone discs, players and drives to read those discs etc.

I don't remember the last time I backed anything up to optical discs. It's just extremely impractical.

[MFM123 Posted Mar 14th 2009 4:19PM]

Brian Kaempen

So, what you're saying is that to be absolutely and completely certain that my back-up HDDs hold their data properly and reliably for many years is that I need to spend a few $ on a caddy and plug them in every 6mths or 1 year or so?

Interesting and thanks.

I'm not saying you or Larry Jordan are wrong but I have stored things for over a year without problem but OK I'll remember to do that.

All ways around it's still a damned sight less cost than a Blu-ray burner and blank Blu-ray media.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 5th 2009 4:05AM]

I don't know about that. I have hard drives from the late 80s that still work fine. Not long ago I rebuilt an old IBM XT and installed a 5MB full height hard drive, and it booted to DOS. Still had some programs like WordStar and they loaded right up. Also have a 100MB IBM hard drive from an old 386 and it still has Windows 3.1 and a lot of games on it. Hard drives of any age can fail without warning of course, but I don't think the data just disappears from them.