50 GB Blu-ray drive for MacPro/G5

[Roger Howard]

On Thu, January 25, 2007 6:56 am, Shawn Erickson wrote:
>
> On Jan 24, 2007, at 9:43 PM, Shaun Wexler wrote:
>
>> On Jan 24, 2007, at 7:43 PM, Shaun Wexler wrote:
>>
>>> Yeah, even with a dedicated ATA-133 PCI card (Mac have 30/60/100
>>> internal buses only) it would take nearly 7 hours for a full 50 GB
>>> Blu-ray disc!
>>
>> Bad math's.  At 36 mbps, 2x, it would take about 1 hour for 25 GB,
>> 2 hrs per 50 GB.
>
> The drives specs list 9 MB / sec as its max rate for writing. So we
> are looking at just over 1.5 hours to file a 50 GB disk if the max
> write speed can be sustained by the drive.

At the moment I'm dying for a new offline archiving solution; 50GB per
optical disk, even with the relatively high drive cost now, is a pretty
good option, considering 2x media seems to be between 12 and 20 dollars at
the moment.

Hard disks are a great value for bulk storage, but I don't think stacking
a bunch of drives in my safe, or offsite, is a great long-term solution.

Then again, BD-R is a brand new format, with virtually no track record; it
could well disappear or fail to thrive. So I'm not diving in to it yet...
but still, it does fill a nice void right now that only tape really
addresses (the capacity of DVD-R is just not sufficient anymore as a
low-end archiving solution).

Playing the wait and see game...

-Rh