Verbatim 43614 BD-RE Rewritable 25GB Blu-Ray Disc Jewel Case

I wrote the original review of these excellent products in
Feb 2008, however, it's now September 2009 and - about 18 months on  prices of
these discs have not significantly fallen, but in that same period other
technologies have got a LOT cheaper and considerably more capacious.
Consequently, your reviewer believes that we have crossed a Rubicon... let me
explain!

(Note: If you
only came here to find out about the Blu-Ray discs - scroll down to
"Original Review")

If you're reading this, the chances are you have a lot of
data to store. Since video is the "fattest" data type, you probably
have lots of that, or possibly you have enormous amounts of audio or perhaps
hi-res images. In short, you have a data storage problem to solve.

We're now seeing mainstream hard drives from Seagate,
Samsung and others offering 1.5 Terabytes (that's 1,500 Gigabytes or 1.5
MILLION megabytes) offered for a delivered cost well under £100. At the time of
writing, Amazon is offering Samsung Spinpoint 1.5TB drives for £80 - delivered.
Each of these hard drives will hold the equivalent of 60 of Blu-Ray discs, or
30 if you'd prefer to compare the later dual-layer Blu-Ray discs which can each
store 50GBytes each.

60 x Blu-Ray discs, even at the best prices available today,
will cost you about £5.10 delivered cost per disc, or £306 for the lot. If you
used dual layer discs you'd be paying about £8.90 delivered cost per disc, and
therefore paying £267 for 30 of them. Using conventional shelving (CD format
wall shelves) 60 discs will occupy a space around 33" (84cm) wide by
6" (15cm) high by 6" (15cm) deep.

So, for the Blu-Ray side of the equation, we have a minimum
purchase cost of about 17 pence per gigabyte, and for our 1,500 gigabytes on
dual layer Blu-Ray we'd need a physical space of about 594 cubic inches. We
might also factor in the amount of time it would take to write these discs -
but that's widely variable by writer, by system and by Blu-ray brand, so let's
leave that aside.

On the hard drive side, we have a purchase cost of £80 which
gives a cost per gigabyte of about 5.3 pence per gigabyte. When inside the
anti-static plastic cases in which they are supplied, each hard drive measures
7" (about 18cm) long by 5" (12.5cm) wide by 1.5" (35.5cm) deep.
That's 52.5 cubic inches. Since we only need one, that's the amount of space
that the hard drive version of our 1.5TBytes of storage will occupy.

For the Blu-Ray discs you would need a writer, and this will
cost about £140 delivered. To use the hard drive as plug-in storage for your PC
you would need a SATA hard drive docking bay that will cost you about £35
delivered.

So the headlines are: The Blu-Ray version of 1.5Terabytes of
storage will cost us more than 3 times as much to buy, involve equipment that
costs about 3 times as much and occupy more than ten times the amount of space
in our home when we have it.

But of course, that's not the whole story... there are the
issues of longevity and accessibility.

Pretty obviously, hard drives (with all their mechanical
parts) in daily use don't last as long as optical discs stored on the shelf.
But, in this scenario we are looking at using hard drives as long-term offline
storage, we write our archive data onto them and then unplug from our system
and put them somewhere safe in their anti-static box, in much the same way as
we always have done with CDs, DVDs and Blu_ray discs.

There is surprisingly little information available on the
longevity of hard discs when used in this way: That's probably because, in
consumer land at least, it's only in the last year or so that it has been
financially and space advantageous to use them thus. What information there is
suggests that, if properly stored in reasonable conditions (avoiding extremes
of temperatures such as might be found in a loft or garage), a hard drive will
last a very long time, if not in daily use.

It's easy to damage an optical disc by scratching it. Part
or all of the data on it can be rendered unreadable by such damage. Similarly
it's possible to drop a hard drive and damage it, or to do bad things to it
such that the file system on it becomes corrupted and the files lost.

The risk of losing files is one you need to form a personal
view about depending on what you want to achieve. Are you building an archive?
(Keep everything, forever) or a library? (Keep things for a while but gradually
replace them with newer things). As with all backup schemes, it comes down to
the question of "What are you NOT prepared to lose"? The answer to
that question will show you whether or not you need to make dual copies.

As I said in my Blu-Ray review I always create two copies of
my Blu-Ray archive discs to guard against data loss, and when using a hard disc
based backup scheme (which, yes, I am now doing for some data) I do the same, I
write the same set of files to two hard discs as a safeguard and store those
hard drives in different places. Additionally I ensure that each pair of hard
drives is from a different manufacturer, if they were both from the same
batch of product that has obvious potential dangers. Of course, which ever
technology you use, creating two copies doubles the time and cost, but gives
reasonable peace of mind.

So, I think it's pretty clear that we have crossed a Rubicon:
Pluggable Hard Disc storage now has to be the technology of choice for many
archive and backup needs. That's not to say that optical disc storage is
obsolete, it's still a good method for data interchange between systems and for
other purposes. But as a backup medium I believe it has been eclipsed. No doubt
optical storage will fight back with denser storage on newer formats, but with
hard drives now having such a commanding lead in price, performance and
footprint (and with 2TB hard drives on the slate for 2010) the next generation
of optical products would have to be pretty spectacular to get back into pole
position.

NOTES:

* If you go down the pluggable hard drive route, make sure that your operating system and the docking product that you buy provide full support for "hot-plugging" drives (i.e. inserting and removing hard discs while the system is running).
* Windows XP and Vista provide such support - but the additional hardware and its software driver must ALSO be Windows hot-plug compliant for it to work properly.
* BAD things may happen to your file system data if you don't have the necessary hot-plug support.

=======Original Review

I was hesitatant in going Blu-Ray. I have used DVD recordable since its early days. I went through the buying cheap and nasty DVD recordables phase, and paying the price for that, in terms of discs I could not read only a few weeks after burning them. I then switched to using branded DVDs - which I have been doing for 5 years or more with very few problems.

The problem is that - as it gets ever easier to create digital data by the truckload (in my case by making lots of digital off-air TV and radio recordings) the once mighty 4.7Gbytes capacity offered by DVD Recordable now seems pretty inadequate. Even the 8.6GB dual layer DVD discs - which are actually pretty good now if you buy branded ones - don't really solve the problem any more - especially when you consider the size of hard drives out there now - 1000GBytes for under £100, and 1.5TB drives on the way (August 2008) - sheesh!

Enter Blu-Ray (yes we got there! Sorry if you thought you'd wandered into the wrong review there for a minute or two!). 25Gbytes per disc - on a platter the same size as CD or DVD - seems like a dream come true. Here's the good news: IT IS A DREAM COME TRUE!!

Seeing the ever rising tide of DVD recordables around me one day last year I got desperate! I did a little research and then, took a deep breath and ordered a Pioneer Blu-Ray writer drive and also a Lite-ON Blu-Ray reader (I always advocate making sure you can read written discs on a different drive to the one that wrote them - it's a much more reliable check that just a verify pass on the same drive, which of course, can mostly read what it wrote - so can most doctors!).

Ever since I got and installed these drives (upgrading Nero to Version 7 which supports Blu-Ray as soon as you install the drive) I have been buying these Verbatim Blu-Ray recordables (and also a few rewritables). It's been excellent, none of the hassle that I had in the early days of DVD with spoiled discs by the binload, in fact I have now written almost 100 Blu-Rays and NONE of them have failed - which to me is pretty impressive. Almost all of them have been these Verbatim products - but a handful were TDK ones - and they all worked flawlessly. FYI I use these discs as ROMS to contain flat video MPEG2 files - I am not using them as Blu-Ray entertainment discs.

Now, the bad news (don't worry it's not THAT bad!): It takes a while to write each disc. Well, the discs are mostly 2x discs and there's 25GB to write - so do the calcs and you can see why. I usually reckon about 2.5 hours per disc with a verify pass on the writer. Then about 12-15 minutes on my other system with the Blu-Ray reader installed, to copy all the files off the new disc to a gash folder on hard disc - just to prove everything on the disc is readable. Read more ›

I recently added a blu-ray writer to my system after several months of doubt about the potential value to me, how it may be used and other questions not least about the cost relative to DVD writers, typically 8-10 times more and especially the media.

Many of the disks of whatever type I have used until now are employed to contain semi-archival material that may have a lifespan of 3-5 years before redundancy, although for some purposes longer-term value may be important. As systems get faster and installed memory become ever greater, file-sizes seem to grow to match. I have had several that would not fit on a dual-layer DVD and kept them on a hard drive until recently. Hard drives have about the shortest life expectancy of any storage medium and so are unsuitable for long-term storage unless the drive is off-line and unused, which is not always possible.

Blu-ray disks promise a longer archival life than any other current storage medium and these will store the equivalent of about 2.8 dual-layer DVDs but write in rather less time than is typical for most dual-layer media, although rather more expensive. However, as dual-layer DVDs are considerably more expensive than their single-layer cousins, the difference in cost between them and blu-ray is not that great.

I bought a small number to start and have used them thus far to check how my video blu-ray player will handle certain captured media files. Consequently, the disks are constantly re-used and have reduced the issue of producing coasters with BD-R disks, of which there have been several due to a variety of technical factors, but one or two of my own causation. I have also loaned one to a friend rather than use a BD-R that will be discarded later.

They appear to be extremely reliable in writing and I have had no problem with re-writing without needing to first perform a full-erase. However, that may depend on the writer used. I have at times standardised on Verbatim media and, other than a time when I bought a carton that were fakes, have found them completely reliable. I use an LG BD-RE drive and have had no significant issues with Verbatim media.

Recommended!

Verbatim 43614 BD-RE Rewritable 25GB Blu-Ray Disc Jewel Case
I'm a big fan of Verbatim Disks, I have never in my history with computers ever had one fail.
I was very very impressed as 22GB of data was written in just under 1hour 20mins!! The SERL Technology, (Super Eutectic Recording Layer) is a massive bonus because it means that I can re-write over and over aagian without loss of performance, up to 1000 times (apparantly), not sure about that but I have got other Verbatim disks with the same SERL Technolgy and I have re-written on them meny times.
So all in all you get a great tough/Hard neat disk with all the above for under a fiver, you really can't go wrong.
It is a must have at this price and it's such an outstanding disk. 5*+++++
Oh yeah, and the burning speed for me went over 2X(max), why I don't know, that makes it even better.