Blu-Ray data Storage Questions

[kt515]

I am working on a way to switch my company's long term storage from paper to blu-ray. I have several questions and concerns and I am not an expert at blu-ray. Please any personal experience, knowledge or any insight will be greatly appreciated.

1.) What are the benefits to having the blu-ray drive internal as opposed to external? Does external BD burners function at a level not as high as internal drives?

2.) Will a high powered CAD station be meet the requirements for a Blu ray burner to be used on the computer?

3.) If only new data is being added to a BD-RE disc (no information is being recorded over) will the disc wear out and affect the data?

4.) Is there a way to lock the data on a BD-RE disc after the final burning has been made so no data can be altered or deleted (so data can only be read) ?

5.) Is there a way to have a time key that cannot be altered for data that is burned onto the disc (authentication) ?

6.) Once I have filled a 25 GB disc and I want to make a duplicate of it- What is the best way to do this with only having one blu-ray burner? (for data storage reasons there needs to be two copies- one on site one off site)


Thank you so much for your responses

[Robert Franklin]

1. IMO, there is really no real benefit regarding internal and external drives. I prefer internal, because I don't want to have to deal with and see data cables and power cords, so I purchased 2 internal Blu-ray drives. The only benefit that comes to mind regarding external is you can take it to a friends house, or another computer.

2. I don't see the need for a high powered CAD station. For one, I don't have a high powered CAD station. My configuration is: Vista Ultimate 64-bit with 4G of RAM a Nvidia 8400GS Video Card and my 2 Panasonic SW 5584 burners.

System Requirements:

Available 5.25" drive bay
SATA controller with available connector
Microsoft Windows XP, Vista
Burning software that supports Blu-ray
Minimum of 256 MB of RAM


Now, that doesn't sound like a High powered CAD station; does it?

3. I'm not certain how to answer that question. I don't have any experience with RE discs. But, I guess I would suggest that you run a program such as Nero when you first start the burning process and indicate that it would be a multi-session disc that you are recording to. I really don't think that the data would wear out. Just because the discs and the technology is somewhat new. If I can remember correctly, according the whitepapers that initially came out during the R&D phase of blu-ray, I thought I read that the data on blu-ray would be protected on discs for about 50 to 100 years. But, don't quote me on that.

4. What it appears you are referring to is finalization. Finalization is a process that (closes) a disc, and it is necessary for other machines to be able to read the data from the disc. So, in this instance, you would need a BD-R (Write-Once) disc. Those are getting cheaper now too!

5. This question sounds like encryption to me. You can do this on Nero. You can backup files and the hard and use a blu-ray disc as the medium for your backup. One of the options prior to beginning the backup is to encrpyt the data. I haven't used that, but I am sure that you would need some sort of password for authentication to proceed with retrieving information from the disc.

6. Again, I refer to Nero, but I am sure that there are other programs that can do what you require. Nero won't legally copy movie blu-ray discs, but you can copy your own personal data discs with it. If you buy the blu-ray plug-in which is between $5-$10, depending on them having a sale; all you have to do is enter the key in the Nero Control Center and BAM!! There you go! Go to Copy Discs, and you will see options for CD, DVD, and Blu-ray. Do as you would any other copying program; place the original disc in and after that is complete, place the blank in afterwards and there you go. I think the only hurdle you would encounter is; do you have enough space so that it can write a temporary image to your hard drive. I think to do a 25G disc you need 30G of hard drive space, and for a 50G disc, I think you would need at least 60G of free space.


I hope I answered all of your questions and I hope that you can get burning and have fun!! Let me know if you have any more questions.