Suggestion: Sony Optical Disc Archive ?

CarliSubaduba · January 2, 2019

Recently Linus did a video about backing up their whole Petabyte Project to the tape media. But I'm wondering, why they didn't choose the Sony Optical Disc Archive? They offer 50 years of durability. https://pro.sony/en_HR/products/optical-disc

For me, it seems much more attractive in 2019 and I don't understand, why they didn't choose this option. So I would like to share this as a suggestion for the next video .

(Sorry if this post is in the wrong section - if so, please move it where it belongs.)

mariushm · January 2, 2019

What's there to say about it? They're just a bunch of bluray discs stacked inside a cartridge.

The 1.5 TB cartridge is around 230$ - that's around 15 cents per GB.

You can buy a pack of 25 x 50 BD-R discs for 66$ - that's 5 cents per GB

Yeah, they claim 50 years life, but that's crap. They said the same thing about CD-R, that they'd last 10-20 years, even special "gold" and archival discs that were advertised for 20+ years turned out to not last that much unless you stored them in a climate controlled room.

Even if they use some special chemical formulas on the bluray discs to prevent bit rot and delamination from the edges of the disc, I wouldn't trust those cartridges for more than 5 years.

And I don't really care about such claims anymore, like lasting more than 10 years... just look at some tape formats that were launched 10 years or earlier and try to find a tape drive that would actually function on a modern system, which uses something newer than let's say Windows XP.

If your tape drive dies on you, unless you also buy and store in a safe a bunch of tape drives or disc drive units, there's no guarantee you'd be able to buy 10-20 years later a machine to read the archival media.

You could just stick with mechanical drives...

Right now 8 TB are as low as 180$ (a 8 TB Seagate drive on Newegg) ... that's around $0.024 or 24 cents per GB (because it's actually ~ 7450 GB usable).

6TB drives are around 140$, which means it costs you around $0.025 per GB ( est. ~ 5590 GB usable) so the sweetspot's 8 TB these days.

Even with the price of electricity and having to keep the hard drive spinning and accounting for hard drive failures (buy one hdd as spare for every 4-5 hard drives) it would still be a good price per GB... the optical archival media would need to be less than 10 cents per GB to be worth it.