I don’t burn enough to have my own opinions with regard to quality, and in fact have little enough experience with burning CDs, let alone DVDs. But my impression is that TY value line discs use archival-quality ink and that their premium discs are definitely considered archival quality – so am not inclined to change my earlier observations about the premium line at the $0.085/GB price point even if those at the $0.05/GB value line price point may be debatable (and their price for TYG02 8x premium TY discs is only $0.067/GB if the 16x speed isn’t required).

As for redundancy, you need that with *any* medium. When whole-disc failure is the issue, then relative quality doesn’t matter as much: physical destruction can happen just as easily to high-end media as to low-end media. When spot drop-outs are the issue, it’s more like the BER problem in magnetic disks: the chance that two copies will have drop-outs in the same location is minuscule even with less-than-highest-end media. So as long as the media quality isn’t execrable you need either two copies (if you’re not worried about a disc getting physically broken) or three copies – and, of course, you need to check them every once in a while to make sure that they’re still completely readable. (Actually, if you incorporate some additional parity-based redundancy when you record the discs, that may guard against spot drop-outs sufficiently that just two copies could be considered sufficient even to cover the risk that one will be destroyed.)

- bill

I’ve got an acquaintance with 17 years in the hard disk industry and a fist full of patents including 3 that are using in every hard drive you own. She says that from her observations Taiyo Yuden Value DVD-Rs are garbage and that the good Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs with which they made their reputation there are marginal for anything you might want to keep past a year. She only uses MAM-A gold archival DVDs for critical stuff and burns two at a time with plenty of redundancy since in her (and my) observation they deteriorate faster than good CD-R media (TY or MAM). Those go for $216 for 100 from our favorite distributor.

I’m sufficiently paranoid that I’ve stuck with Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs since I stopped using the now out of production Kodak Gold CD-R media from the ’90s (whatever Kodak is selling now is I believe private label), and I haven’t lost a TY CD-R yet, although I’ve not done statistically significant checks on my older discs burned in this century.

If you’re REALLY paranoid, you use MAM-A gold CD-R media, which are at $133 for 100 from the same MAM-A distributor mentioned above. None of us are willing to touch recordable Blue-ray yet.

If I was a film studio, it would take me a while to trust a brand new media with an unknown track record, and a very long while for a single source, we know there are going to be readers available for CD, DVD and Blue-ray media for a very long time. Plus if I was in their shoes I wouldn’t use just one type of media for a total long term archival solution.

- Harold

$0.60/GB is kind of pricey compared with contemporary commodity disk (at $0.20/GB and falling even for quantity-one retail purchases – I have no idea how cheaply you can buy it in real quantity, though for personal use have stopped looking at anything above $0.15/GB since such deals come along pretty frequently).

And for archiving – well, I just ordered 100 Taiyo Yuden 8x DVD-Rs for $24, shipped, which works out to about $0.05/GB for a medium that should last well over 50 years with proper storage (yeah, I would have had to pay about $0.085/GB for 16x discs that would match the 20 MB/sec bandwidth of the holographic product). There is, of course, something to be said for not having to manage so many individual discs for truly large archives, but then there’s also something to be said for using a medium that already has jukebox-style products available for handling such problems).

So while the achievement is significant, whether it will be *commercially* significant will strongly depend upon how fast it can slide down the price curve: the competition is tough and will only become tougher.

- bill