Blu-Ray Speed

Anyone wanna take a guess as to when blu-ray burners become cheap for those in North America and places like Jamaica and Trinidad? Like around US$200 and 6x to 8x or 12x by miod-2009? I want a blu ray burner but I have no access to any right now, financially, mostly. I have so much data and I need to backup to blu-ray and get rid of my clutter. Besides that, I like to be the first to have latest tech, whether software or hardware.

If you want to back stuff up, it's cheaper to buy a USB hard drive and back up to that. You'd pay more for the blank discs, nevermind the drive.

This coming christmas season will probably the time though if you just have to have bluray. Prices are beginning to fall now.

USB drives are cool but I am looking for something permanent or long term. Whether it's burning images to discs and preserving it or maybe install items from a burnt disc to my sister's laptop or friend, etc. And I am not talking about bootleg stuff. I mean personal videos and my other personal content and backups of games as well.


I am fascinated with blu-ray even though USB is good. I do hope that USB hard drives will be the future or even flash drives as they are so unique and transferrable if you don't buy discs like I do and they are faster than IDE, SATA, etc. They are the future. I want usb hard drives and blu-ray to catch up.


Later...

I wouldn't really consider optical media as a permanent option for backups. I believe they are more susceptible to temperature and other environmental factors than hard drives.

I use hard drives with external enclosures for backups. I usually reinstall windows twice a year and when I do that, I'm installing it on a brand new hard drive. The old hard drive is where I put my data on and I remove it from the computer and store it in a safe place. In fact, I'm so paranoid about the safety of my data, I copy the same data to two different hard drives and store one at home and one at work (with the more sensitive data on an encrypted file system). And since Blu-ray drives aren't quite ubiquitous yet, restoring data to a computer without Blu-ray may prove problematic.

I know that over time that recordable optical media can "fade" over time, so I wouldn't consider it a long term solution. Unless you had some type of backup plan where you would refresh the optical media ever so many years, I wouldn't consider it safe for a long term solution.

After posting that message I did realize it would be easier to physically ship optical media than a whole hard drive. Would be safer too.

I did not mean to come off as argumentative. I apologize.

Personally I love my storage media. I can't do without it whether CD or DVD and even Blu-Ray. I like backing up stuff so it is easy to lend and find. Why waste money on a hard drive which can crash. At least you cvan have several files burnt to DVDs and it is more portable as well. You don't want to lend you hard drive every two seconds to your friends when you can burn a disc and lend them and know that there is less risk. One disc can backup so much. USB drives are cool but I don't see them taking away from the optical disc burning thing.

Hey Bare Foot Kid, I didn't know they had USB drives that big. How much can you get them for at computers stores or big name places like Circuit City, RadioShack, CompUSA or places in the Caribbean? Are they popular at that size? Or are they rare and very expensive right now? They certainly would be good to have around but as far as a 8GB USB drive is concerned I would not buy those. I would only buy the 32GB as suggested here in the thread you linked me to. Thanks for the info. Price, availability please?

Just make one yourself... newegg.com