Post BA22m7XLFkM0KAIBPs by meowski@fluf.club
(DIR) More posts by meowski@fluf.club
(DIR) Post #BA1nuSKoJPxXpdwnwm by quad@akko.quad.moe
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optical media is low-key underrated tbh.A rewritable BD-RE is 25GB, and you can get a spindle of 10 (250GB) for about the same price as most cheap 64GB flash drive these days."But quad, burning a disc is so slow"And so what? A blu-ray writes at around 4 MB/s, and every single writer I've seen does 2X speed. Most bargain bin flash drives I've encountered don't go much faster anyways. If you want a fast flash drive they definitely cost more than optical media.The main disadvantage is of course that devices need to have an optical drive, and if you plan to rewrite the media 100 times, flash storage is likely a better idea.But in an age of overpriced flash storage, a cheap plastic disc can be a godsend
(DIR) Post #BA1og1UhPL76UIFqHg by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@quad another advantage is that an optical disk is read-only and doesn't have firmware, so after it's burned, no new malware can infect it
(DIR) Post #BA1ojtCw9tVdwhn2v2 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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DVD is even better in terms of price, you can get multiple terabytes of DVDs for not much more than a flash drive, and for a quarter the cost of a comparable hard drive.Unfortunately DVDs can't really keep up with most modern use as they're a bit small and their speed is rather low. But if one has enough patience they still provide an insanely low price per TBUnfortunately, burning data to optical media was all but a dying trend in the days of blu-ray. Reserved mostly for some companies backing up or archiving stuff on M-discs (Special BD-R with extended lifetime). I wonder how cheap storage could've been if only BD-Rs remained popular so there was actual volume and competition to force the price of discs down.
(DIR) Post #BA1p7iGYUV0kxdqI7M by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@wolf480pl As someone who works at a place with a government contract, I know.It's also worth mentioning that if write-once is okay, a DVD or Blu-ray disc goes even faster and cheaper. BD-RE and DVD-RW both cost more and are slower.A DVD-R is faster and can be mastered to effectively lock in the integrity of data on the disc, all while writing/reading faster and being even cheaper. Of course it's write-once, which is the unfortunate part.A DVD+RW does X4 speeds, which in real world conditions works out to about 3-4 MB/s in a cheap drive or 10-ish MB/s in a better drive (depends on CAV/CLV and whether writing to inside or outside). But a DVD-R is typically X16 and you can read/write in excess of 20 MB/s to one of those fuckers with a half-decent drive.
(DIR) Post #BA1pLMXU4HENd8GkxU by quad@akko.quad.moe
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I said multiple terabytes, but I meant "a terabyte", dunno how I twisted that around.Regardless, point is that optical media is cheap and flexible. It's also very compact, you can get a 100 disc spindle of DVDs, but imagine if someone actually bothered selling a 100 disc spindle of Blu-rays, then we'd be talking 2.5TB in a single spindle, and most definitely at a decent price.Alas, recordable disc manufacturing is a dying market with Verbatim being the lone company providing most products.
(DIR) Post #BA1pnHUqPSeK6DLafQ by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@quadin the age of copy-on-write filesystems, S3-compatible blob storage, git annex, and so on, I think append-only is enough for many usecases. Though that requires multi-session recording, which means giving up on some of the advantaged above.Cause like, how often do you modify files on your NAS or on USB sticks? IME it's mostly adding more files until there's no space, then deleting some.
(DIR) Post #BA1rXdicDjNoILSRpA by quad@akko.quad.moe
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In the end, the market does what the market does.A flash drive is more convenient, and that's all it needed to be. Even if their cost per GB was 100x that of a disc 20 years ago when DVDs were cool and Blu-ray was new, consumers still chose it.Today the optical disc market is borderline dead. Nobody buys 100GB BD-RE XL discs and most companies making discs have entirely left the market. So we never got cheap 100GB discs.But as computers and storage keep getting more expensive, a plastic disc has suddenly become surprisingly viable again.
(DIR) Post #BA1sD4tm4RlQStR8Ns by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@quad sounds like an intro text for Redline or GitS
(DIR) Post #BA1uzWs1ZjMb1gqi4u by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@wolf480pl No clue what GitS is. By redline you mean the madhouse movie?
(DIR) Post #BA1vDWcRJ4eCIiEWIK by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@quadyes I mean madhouse movie.GitS is Ghost in the Shell
(DIR) Post #BA1vJBFBgvbdkF3PHc by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@wolf480pl Oh, I've watched redline, haven't watched Ghost in the Shell
(DIR) Post #BA1vOiL44b6zpnRRZ2 by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@quad"In a world where prices of flash media have pushed people into the cloud""A group of weirdos continues to use optical disks to store data locally..."*strong beat starts*
(DIR) Post #BA1z0jukxlGLaVxYyO by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@sj_zero In freedom bucks the price for rewritable optical media seems to be in the ballpark of $0.50 per 4.7GB DVD-RW, or about $2 per 25GB BD-RE.If one is okay with write-once media like DVD-R and BD-R, they are even cheaper.
(DIR) Post #BA1z9RRgzysAukVyds by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@sj_zero (I think you can get the 25GB blu-rays down to sub-$1 if you find a good deal on a large enough spindle)
(DIR) Post #BA1zYfin3hqoQgXiQi by quad@akko.quad.moe
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In case anyone is now unironically considering buying optical media. The best source is from Japanese sellers on ebay.Recordable Blu-ray discs were far more popular over there as Blu-ray video recorders which captured TV to a Blu-ray were a thing that pretty much only Japan cared about. They're dead now afaik, but there's still shitloads of affordable discs left.
(DIR) Post #BA20NBeUcDOPwKcVYu by stormbringer@noauthority.social
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@quad Apparently the optical disks marked as M-Disc have a significantly longer shelf life (theoretically 1000 years?) I've been beginning to backup my GoG games on them. I also store my regular data and media in additional backups. Proton Drive for the cloud backup and an external drive as well. I'm running out of space in both (3tb). Want to build a NAS, but with prices the way they are, it's like building a high end gaming rig 😩
(DIR) Post #BA20NBsflUjeeJFpfE by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@stormbringer Yes, CD-R and DVD-R have pretty decent lifespans, but BD-R somewhat infamously has a shorter lifespan than other optical media, they'll still last many years if treated right though. But if you plan to use blu-ray for long-term archival, buying M-disc is a good idea.The gist of what I've heard is that it varies depending on disc construction. All CD-Rs should be decent enough, DVDs are okay as long as you stick to regular DVD-R rather than DL or RW discs. But standard blu-rays aren't too good, which is why M-disc is needed for archival use.
(DIR) Post #BA214iPwfcSG0nZV6O by stormbringer@noauthority.social
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@quad this is 2.5 terabytes for $230
(DIR) Post #BA214icLvUNadHNPRQ by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@stormbringer Those are BDXL, which sadly never dropped in price due to how recent they are.Blu-rays are available as 25GB and 50GB. The 100GB ones are a different format (Perhaps better known as a "UHD Blu-ray"). I wish they ever got enough traction for prices to fall. But you're better off sticking to 25/50GB discs.If you do that you can get 2.5 Terabytes of REWRITABLE discs for less than $50Japanese sellers are often the best source as optical media had a better run in Japan than elsewhere.
(DIR) Post #BA218bzkUVIBFdAzrs by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@stormbringer Sorry, my bad, that's 1.25TB, not 2.5TB.
(DIR) Post #BA21NmRDwhnjz3GDCK by meowski@fluf.club
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@quad there is something comforting about optical media for backups. no electronics like a flash drive or ssd to get fried by an EMP or solar flare. no chance of being accidentally overwritten (except for rewritable discs but i never use those). the discs don't last much longer than 20 years though, even if climate controlled so eventually you need to move the data.
(DIR) Post #BA21jCpwzUedwJ2i6y by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@meowski That depends on disc. If your goal is long-term archival you can buy M-disc. I don't know how true their claims about their lifespan are though, but probably long enough for most people.
(DIR) Post #BA21pW9e55jZacGSau by meowski@fluf.club
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@quad yea i do buy those m-discs and i guess i haven't had any of them for 20 years yet. but other ones, older burned CDs, and especailly anything with a sticker label, are trash after that much time. they start to delaminate
(DIR) Post #BA22ImxKh1KI61Skt6 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@meowski To my knowledge, the dye is what fails and causes the discs to de-laminate. CD-R and DVD-R will fail after about 20 years. Many BD-R use especially bad dye and might die as quickly as 5 years.However alternate dyes can solve this. For DVD-R they use some gold reflective layer instead, not sure if there's a name for them but they're often sold as "Gold" or "Archival" DVD-Rs. Same for CDs.For blu-rays they actually "fixed" this for BD-RE, so strangely enough rewritable BD-RE discs will last longer than a regular BD-R I've heard. The difference is that for Blu-rays, the long-term discs are called "M-disc" so they're easier to spot. Sony also made some archival blu-rays.Point is that M-disc equivalents exist for CD-R and DVD-R as well. They're just not as clearly branded as M-disc is for Blu-ray. In fact M-disc started with DVDs, so M-disc DVDs exist as well.
(DIR) Post #BA22b05AczQa1GoSLg by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@meowski So if you want a DVD-R that lasts longer than 20 years, products like this are available: https://www.verbatim.com/en/professional-optical/products/95355-dvd-r-47gb-16x-ultralife-gold-archival-grade-with-branded-surface-and-hard-coatAlthough the modern selection has of course shrunk incredibly, I don't know if Verbatim has any competition at all anymore.Of course just like M-disc I have no clue how true their claims actually are.
(DIR) Post #BA22m7XLFkM0KAIBPs by meowski@fluf.club
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@quad i should probably consolidate all my old burned DVDs onto bluray at some point cause they're not going to last much longeralso considering just getting a handful of those 2tb micro SD cards
(DIR) Post #BA234y7CVT2ibc3JT6 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@meowski I'm not sure how much I'd trust a microSD card to hold data long term, can't imagine they'd do much better than the 10-20 years a basic disc lasts. If you're willing to spend that much on writable storage, it seems like a better idea to just get two regular HDDs. Especially if you use them as a mirrored pair, a modern filesystem like ZFS is able to detect corruption, automatically repair it and report that the failure happened. Maybe btrfs is coming along on that front as well.
(DIR) Post #BA23JtIWhQim0bSv2m by meowski@fluf.club
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@quad yea i use SSDs for temporary backups and every so often i will burn some bluray discs. i have too much data though. would take forever to burn all of it onto bluray.
(DIR) Post #BA2MejSQNZ2GhRkLmi by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro That depends on how you use them. If you're using them to move files or to archive data as you go, you'd presumably do that manually, no different from other medium.If you're trying to do automatic backups, then yes, you'd want some kind of automatic media changer. Similar to how companies have tape libraries.
(DIR) Post #BA2NsYO2R7mMNAqj6u by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro Doesn't really stop the need for archival though.For example I work at a shipyard, every time we build a ship we're required to keep the documentation and related files for quite a while (i can't remember the number, but i think it was 40 years or something). We print what we can, but while you can print the drawing, you can't exactly print the AutoCAD file itself. So we used to cram those files onto an M-disc most recently. It also means we have a basement full of old IBM tapes from the 80s we can't read. Because honestly that's not really our problem, we're just required to ensure it exists as far as I'm aware.And during the timespan where all of this crap has been floating around the shipyard has changed ownership like 4 times, gone bankrupt once and shut down for multiple years and the entire staff of the company have probably been rotated 10 times.And yes, that AutoCAD file 1993 has to stay here somewhere, even if periodically there are no humans and zero budget to maintain it, besides a room to keep it in.This is unfortunately how most archival is done, not in the way the Internet Archive does where they actually backup the internet regularly and keep it available."Archival" in most cases means you write something once and then it hopefully doesn't get touched for 20 years. That just isn't the archival use you hear about.
(DIR) Post #BA2OsqHW0JIHpJV37g by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro That is true. Each archive have their own needs. I would also argue that film is a bit of a unique situation though, compared to other media it's either analogue, or when digitized, it's huge as fuck.Even if one were to use hard drives, the cost of hard drives have only made that a reasonable option in pretty recent times."Archival" in the majority typically refers to writing something once and then only needing to access it in an emergency. I agree with you that all digital data should be maintained to some degree, but if that's outside your powers, whether it be manpower or budget, I don't really know of many modern options. It's great if someone can refresh the archive every 5 years or so, or if your company has the perpetual wallet to just pay for cloud glacier storage.But for most average corporate data or family data, whether it's accounting spreadsheets, family photos, medical records or a music collection, dumping it on a disc or tape still seems like the best option depending on which one you can afford.An archival-grade DVD burned 15 years ago can still be read today with a $20 drive off aliexpress and near zero software wrestling on a modern machine if you really need a file off of there.Video is a bit of an outlier due to its sheer mass. I'd know, keeping my collection of "legally" obtained anime accessible on my network is by far the most expensive part of what I self-host.
(DIR) Post #BA2PSR3fGGZk1SzeRU by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro I'm pretty sure that exists, they're just very uncommon. Things similar to ripstations but for ripping anything as an ISO, I reckon they could also write data pretty easily with some software tweaks.Alas, the market for fancy optical media solutions has been dead for 10 years. 100GB M-disc is the last worthwhile thing we've gotten, but it's seemingly not impressive enough to ever have come down in price, neither media or reader/writer.
(DIR) Post #BA2PaCtjnB1yQG3Wt6 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro Apparently it doesn't just exist, ripstation themselves make one, huh, i thought they only did Audio, but they have a data version too: https://www.mfdigital.com/data_ripping.htmlDoesn't seem to have been upgraded for Blu-ray though.
(DIR) Post #BA2PhtTfsebkVYWwzI by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro But ripstations are basically just robot arms to put discs into regular off-the-shelf readers, so you could probably make it do just about anything you can script it to, as the drives and arm are in reality mostly independent.
(DIR) Post #BA2Psz7pDtvbD1bDRw by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro Well yeah, that's why optical media died. Hard drive prices crossed the horizon around the start of the 2010s. At least in terms of raw price per TB.
(DIR) Post #BA2Q76flxTzafhDBLM by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in like the second post, but I do in fact not consider optical media a good option for any backup where access is needed.Also the ripmaster cannot only operate in sequential mode. The ones with two stacks only read discs in order, the ones with a third stack use the middle one to move discs so it can dig through the stack for specific ones, at least as far as I've understood.
(DIR) Post #BA2QOcAS7ADnH2uVIe by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro I think you overestimate what people expect from an archive.Amazon S3 have an archival tier called glacier. The standard tier only tells you it can retrieve data in "minutes". And their actual long-term archive option has a 12-48 hour retrieval time.Being able to access something in 5-10 minutes is considered extremely rapid as far as archival is concerned.
(DIR) Post #BA2Qb8qoQPBu78hI3s by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro I think you're too hung up on things like Media Libraries and Design Reference Libraries, which are often called "Archives" or "Vaults" by its users, often being network connected or regularly accessed shelved media, but simply done as cheap as possible. But those aren't really archives in the traditional sense.
(DIR) Post #BA2S0wRtG1z98KuG24 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro The reality is sadly that most archival is done by people who don't even want to do the archival. They're just required to hold on to a pile of bits somehow due to regulations or compliance requirements.In fact post-project data archival was the main example used in the S3 graphic.Most archival happens as such:- A project ends (or similar)- One guy gets the job of storing the 200 GB they're required to keep- Company says "here's $100, try to get it done before the end of the day if you can"- The maintenance budget is 0$/year- In 3 years the guy won't work there anymore and nobody else has any clue the backup exists- (Option A, most common by far) 42 years later another employee finds a weird storage device in the basement, reads the label and says "oh, this is from project X, 40 years ago, we're not required to keep this anymore" then it gets thrown in the garbage.- (Option B, uncommon) 27 years later something unexpected happened and the company is required to find these 200GB and hand them over to the one asking.
(DIR) Post #BA2SBgMbP1TsQnYRFo by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@casandro I truly don't want to imagine how many petabytes or exabytes of random crap nobody really wants is just lying around across the world.It's probably the only reason why the M-disc format still exists.