Dive into Blu-Ray for Archiving - Or use HD's?

So, I'm wanting to off-load some data off my redundant hardware RAID Arrays to prolong their usefulness (they are filling up, and upgrading to higher capacity 2TB RAID-level drives will be close to $2000 ). I have a good 300-500GB of data I never really access (but want to keep), and wouldn't mind burning to Blu-Ray as an archival format and freeing up this space on the RAID arrays - but I'm not sure how well BD-R's hold up over time.

What is the common concensus on this topic? Should I just buy a pair of HD's and stick this data on there (two for redundancy), or are BD-R's a viable long-term (5+ years) storage option?

If yes, what are some of you guys' BD-R DL burners and media (single or DL) suggestions? I searched the Storage forum, but there hasn't been a lot of recent talk on this topic.


Thanks!!!

Why not get some Hitachi 2tb drives?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...5475&cm_re=hitachi_2tb-_-22-145-475-_-Product

If I needed to expand my array right now, I'd buy those. They aren't rated for RAID, but they do fine.

I've pondered those - and the price is certainly right compared to Seagate's XT and WD's Black Series 2TB Drives! This is still a ~$500 upgrade for 2 more TB (if only doing a 6-Drive RAID-6) - and that's only one of the RAID arays (I have two seperate/redundant arrays I'll be upgrading!).

Can people confirm that these Hitachi Cool Spin "green" drives (slower than 7200RPM and designed for "power savings") will actually work reliably on Areca RAID cards like the ARC-1222x and ARC-1220? I'd hate to drop $500-$700 on a single set of RAID drives only to have them fall out of the array at will (make that $1000-$1400 for both arrays ). I'll start a new thread on that...

Thanks for the reply, Thiddy! Hope to hear about some success stories with these cheaper Hitachi drives and Areca RAID cards!!!

Don't use the Green/Blue/Black series drives in RAID. You will be playing with TLER and are just asking for it to break.

The reason I would use Hitachi is I know that people have been running them a long time in large RAID arrays without issues.

While I don't have any means of large set of data to deal with I was considering Blu-Rays for a while. After nearly hitting the button to, I decided to get a 2TB HDD instead. While I'd love to have a Blu-Ray player/writer in the PC still, I didn't see it for long term storage of data because the media seems to be all over the board with what is good any what is not.

thideras said:

Don't use the Green/Blue/Black series drives in RAID. You will be playing with TLER and are just asking for it to break.

The reason I would use Hitachi is I know that people have been running them a long time in large RAID arrays without issues.

Click to expand...

Really the Blacks? I've run 3 disk Raid 0's/2 disk Raid 0's and even Matrix Raided 0 and 5 on a pair of disks without issue. Still running the drives today some 3x 640Gig drives in 2 different PC's now.

I run an scsi U320 raid 5 array on one machine and when it started filling up, I added an SATA 3.0 card with esata ports and added two cheapo 1tb drives in a raid 1 array for redundancy. Total cost $200.

deathman20 said:

Really the Blacks? I've run 3 disk Raid 0's/2 disk Raid 0's and even Matrix Raided 0 and 5 on a pair of disks without issue. Still running the drives today some 3x 640Gig drives in 2 different PC's now.

Click to expand...

Yes, any of the WD consumer desktop line has TLER, including the Black series. There are two factors that I've seen where they work ok. First is purely random chance. If no reads go over the limit of the RAID controller (normally 7-15 seconds) to mark it as failed, it continues working fine. The last one is a lot more common; software RAID. Software RAID (which should include any on-board RAID [i.e. Intel] and pure software RAID) will wait for a hard disk indefinitely. So, if a drive goes unresponsive because of TLER, it will only do so for 90 seconds (the upper limit set on the hard drive before it reports a read error) and then continue operating. Normally, it doesn't seem to get anywhere near this limit, so you may notice it is a few seconds (7+) delay. The drive doesn't drop, the array continues functioning as normal.

So, when you say you did a "matrix RAID", that immediately tips me off that you are using an Intel controller. Using software RAID doesn't guarantee perfect results and I would not suggest any hard drive with TLER (or similar feature) in an array unless it is specifically designed with RAID in mind. The RE series that Western Digital has does have TLER, but it isn't allowed longer than 7 seconds.

I stay away from all optical data, been burned WAY too much. Cant concentrate on hardware, gotta concentrate on who makes what, and that changes all the time. Way to much effort for something so stupid. Besides, its HUGE...

I have one ODD in 5 PCs now. I get an ODD I need, I rip it to ISO. Installs? All done via USB stick now.

Archive to a drive and shelve it. Two drives if youcan afford it. (whats two 1TB drives cost, like 4 50GB BDRs? and last 10 times longer?)

External HDDs are cheap.

Gotta say avoid ODD backups. In my experience they're been more of a pain than they're worth. And SLOW. Those 2TB drives Thid posted make the choice for me very obvious. It'd be nice to have a BD-R for movie related stuff, but since storage is so cheap these days any movie on my TV is being played from a computer in the house. Unless its a retail disc.

I'm leaning towards the cheaper Hitachi "CoolSpin" drives as they apparently don't have issues like WD and Seagate's LP/Green drives do.

I just couldn't justify dropping full price for WD Blacks or Seagate XT 2TB Drives to upgrade my current RAID arrays - and BD-R seemed like a temporary band-aid (need to upgrade TWO seperate 8-drive RAID-6 arrays at the same time!).

I think I'll upgrade one of the arrays with those drives and see how it fares. If it holds up for a month or so, I'll upgrade the second array and call it a day If the drives start to fall out of the first array - then I'll have six independent 2TB drives to use as backups for a while as I save for six of the $160 WD Black or Seagate XT 2TB drives

Thanks for steering me clear of BD-R's as an archival format. That could have been ~$200 down the drain (BD drive plus a ton of blank BD-R's) - and who knows if the data would have survived

Greenpowers are fine in single drive configs (and I did not have any problems running 3 in a raid5 on my HTPC for over a year, but I do not have massive 3rd party arrays either )

with long term video file archiving, different people had different fails. they put a HD away for a long time and the motor locks up or something.
( i have never seen a hard drive fail just from being parked, sooo i didnt understand that)

Hds are not vaccume sealed, they have tiny filtered air intakes.
so my first question was , why not do a minor vaccume packing of it ? with sorbent oxygen removers, and/or silicon moisture removers?
with little air and little oxidation possible , that Seems like it would be impervious.
To just put it on a shelf, and hope , when it has air exposure, it is no wonder that it might not last.

with magnetic tape storage, i have stuff that is 20+ years old, but it is stored in a dust free dehumidified environment, mostly to try and protect the plastic, the magnatic changes did get weaker , but the media itself had to hold them together still.
I pulled out tape that is 26 years old, and it still works "ok". I have seen a shoebox full of VHS that was stored in a VERY high humidity enviroment, and it had some kind of mold or mildew growing in it, total loss.

with the BR, it is a dye Burn, not actual glass mastered holes, so a BR collection from the store might hold up for 20 years, but people are reporting that dye change BR they made are not holding up for years.

so my choice would be Hard drives, at least sealed up a bit for that really long term storage.
for shorter storage, it can always be shifted around to a fresher item.

other weird stuff, some long term stored dye change dvds we have the "laminations" seperated around the edges? oops, I didnt think that could also happen :-(
.

As mentioned above, I'll be expanding my current Hardware RAID arrays with the 2TB Hitachi Cool-Spin drives - so storage space will no longer be an issue.

I was initially going to offload 300-500GB from my current RAID-6 arrays to prolong their useful lifespan (offload to BD-R's as my initial post started with), but I'll just bite the bullet and expand both arrays with these $79 Hitachi 5k3000 "Cool Spin" 2TB drives which have been confirmed to work by OCF members on at least 2-3 Areca RAID setups.

I hate keeping track of single drives and having to divy-up my folders across drives for "regular" use. One nice big RAID-6 (8TB plus can lose 2 drives from each array!) with a 100% redundant backup (2 seperate hardware RAID-6 systems) should let me sleep at night.

Offsite is also taken care of with monthly incremental backups to individual 2TB drives as well as most "critical" data on a 3rd Hardware RAID-5 (my Audio Production PC in the JamRoom). Needless to say I don't take my data protection lightly

Staying far away from BD-R for the time being...