I'm going to start buying stacks of 4K BD-ROMs to move my old gaming clips and blender projects and stuff to. I can't keep taking care of more and more 8TB hard drives that are going to die someday and having to hoard and replace them.
The price-to-capacity ratio is worse, sure you can get an 8TB WD Blue for 130 dollars now, but those are mechanical and electronic, they get old and die. SSDs, they get old and die and those are twice as expensive. I'm on low income.
Discs only rot and even then they take way longer. I'll be able to procrastinate on revising that old stuff for as long as I am alive.
While I'm deciding what to move to those discs it will also be a good opportunity to finally delete years of stuff I just don't want anymore. The data hoarding is only half because I'm overprotective but also because that shit piles up and gets hard to sift through.
@bonkmaykr From what I know typical discs aren't always durable as they may seem to be at first, at least this is my experience with CDs and DVDs, I may still be wrong on Bluray.
I wonder if HDDs really die that quickly when you consider the case in which they're not spinning everyday. I have one in my thin client server that I set up only to spin and power on (via hdparm) only when I connect to my NFS share to reduce the chance of my HDD getting worn out quickly.
@kasesag Hard drives can last a long time if taken care of, the 3 to 5 years metric is mostly for datacenters. But they need to be powered on. If they stay unplugged for a very (very) long time then the bits on the platters can start to flip. I can't really fit all of those in my PC case nor be bothered to continually check them for magnetic/mechanical decay.
With discs I can usually just visually inspect them. The only care they need is good climate control and they're always getting cheaper to duplicate.
M-Discs are specially engraved optical discs compatible with existing formats, but manufactured for durability. I have an M-Disc engraver handy but mostly just use it for CD burning up until now. Even some of the really abused normal discs in my collection are working fine so it seemed like the right call
@bonkmaykr I almost have forgotten about the existence of M-Discs, good that you've reminded me of them. I believe I've heard about them last time when I was watching The 8-bit guy.
From what I read on, these surely are different from something I had a chance to experience when using regular CD and DVD discs. I may look at these at some point as these seem to be interesting for data preservation.
@bonkmaykr discs are also WAY smaller and very easily stackable
buy a roll of parchment paper from costco and make some dividers to protect them from scratching each other when you put them back in the stack.
BD-R* You can't write a ROM, shit.