[tobster]

Hi all,

I am considering to purchase a Blu-ray drive for data backups at a studio I work at. We usually end up with folders at the end of a project totaling about 20-45 GB, depending on size. Backing this up to DVD is very tedious because of time, and the amount of DVDs involved. We finish about 10 projects a month on average so I’m looking at up to 100 DVDs burned if things are really busy. As we prefer to have dual hard copies it actually ends up being close to 200 DVDs. Per month.

Now, enter Blu-ray. The sizes of each disk are perfect. The cost is higher, but organization outweighs the cost in our case. So, I have a few questions:

1. I’ve been looking at drives on pricegrabber.com and it seems good drives can be found for about 400-500 USD. Any comments on that?
2. I’ve also been looking at disks on pricegrabber.com and there are very few options. Rewriteable is not needed, so my options are limited. One option for 50GB and one option for 25GB. Should I be looking elsewhere? Is there any place selling spindles?
3. What is the time involved with burning one 25GB Blu-ray disk? Disks rated at 1X for example? I assume disks rated at 2X would take half the time of a 1X…

I would use a Mac Pro with 10GB RAM and latest version of Toast to burn these.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Ps. Extra question for extra credit… what program would be good to catalogue this? (I must admit I have not done research on this yet, so I am calling for the Bart/Google picture )

- tobbi

[bearcatrp]

I have been thinking about blueray for storage too but with 64GB HCSD cards getting ready to come out, might just wait and see what the costs would be. Figure a burner plus disks vs HCSD plus reader will be interesting in a year or so. Read some articles about blueray being obsolete soon as the HC cards getting bigger than 50gb. Guess time will tell. Toast is supposed to work for data on blueray.

[mduell]

1. I don't see a reason to spend more than $260 on a drive.
2. Yes you can get cake boxes of BD-Rs.
3. 1x BluRay is 36Mbps... figure 1.6 hours for 25GB.

[bearcatrp]

Will this work on a mac? Thats a sweet price for both player and disks. This would be nice in my mac pro.

[mduell]

Sure... just run a SATA cable from one of the extra headers on the logic board to the optical bay. You'll probably have to buy a copy of Toast or similar for burning BD-R.