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For actual practical purposes, BD would make so much more sense than DVD. 21 DVDs would be 2~4 disks. I find it a bit odd how that's not an option. Did Bluray n
by baobun 3y ago
For actual practical purposes, BD would make so much more sense than DVD. 21 DVDs would be 2~4 disks. I find it a bit odd how that's not an option. Did Bluray never get significant adoption for PC in the US, such that demand for DVDs would still actually be similar or even higher than for BD?
- tpmoney 3y agoOne thing I've learned recently trying to go back through my old disc collections and archive things is that discs are prone to failure over the long term, and spreading your data out over more discs means less overall loss when a failure occurs. I have CD-Rs that have pin holes in the foil layer, whole sets of DVD-Rs from CompUSA that look perfectly fine and show up as new blank DVDs rather than the data that's clearly on them. Yes, archival quality discs can help and the Taiyo Yuden's I bought way back when I think have all held up, but even some of the pressed and manufactured DVDs and CDs I have are starting to show signs of failure. If I were going to buy a large archive of software, I think I'd want it spread across multiple discs, even at the expense of having more physical media.
- shiroiuma 3y agoI have a bunch of music CDs from the 1980s and 90s, and I've never ever seen a failure on one of these, except from scratching. CD-Rs, of course, have not held up as well.
- not_the_fda 3y agoAudio CDs are really an analog format and are less susceptible to degradation than digital formats.
- shiroiuma 3y agoNo, audio CDs are digital. You're thinking of Laserdiscs, a video format from the 1980s.
- brirec 3y agoThe only computers I’ve seen that ever came with BD drives were basically home “multimedia” PCs — if anything, I’d suspect most of these computers are more likely to already be in the trash than in the possession of someone interested in installing Linux on them. Most people, nerds and otherwise, stopped using optical media for sneakernet years ago, and for good reason: you can buy a 5-pack of 64 GB USB 3.1 flash drives (which hold more, and are faster than, a 50 GB BD-R) for $23 on Amazon.com. For comparison, a 25-pack of 50GB BD-R discs will run you $45, and of course that doesn’t include the drive. It’s still less expensive per GB, but it’s also far less useful because you can’t really share a burned Blu-Ray disc with anyone the way you can share a USB disk.
- goosedragons 3y agoDid BD get significant traction on PCs anywhere? AFAIK, nobody even bothered producing PC games with Blu-ray discs well into the PS4/Xbox One era. Instead at best you got enough DVDs to hold the game or at worst a token DVD with just the installer.
- paholg 3y agoOr just a USB drive. You can get a 128 GB flash drive for under $10; I'm sure it would be much less if buying in bulk. Edit: A quick search shows some on AliExpress for $0.99.
- netsharc 3y agoAliExpress USB drives... sounds legit. TL:DR; fake disks have controllers hacked to report 128GB or whatever, writing to them seems to work and opening the file would give you the first part of the file (so you can see the start of the movie or the song or read the first part of a text file) but the rest of the file will not be there...
- paholg 3y agoSure, I wasn't suggesting to order those exact ones. If I was in a position of offering something of roughly 100 GB on physical media, I would spend more effort looking into it, but would expect something of roughly that price to be available.
- kwk1 3y agoThe single-write aspect of DVDs/BDs is actually a selling point over the use of USB here.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago>Edit: A quick search shows some on AliExpress for $0.99. Nobody can buy 128 GB of flash for $1. They are fake, and will eat your data.
- LanzVonL 3y agoUltra compression like Matt Hahoney has worked on and keeping the distribution to the source code, rather than built packages for all supported architectures, could probably squeeze this down onto 1 DVD. Debian doesn't really support truly antique computers any more, pretty much everything out there that it runs on now can compile everything it needs. Binary packages made a lot more sense when you were running Linux on a Zaurus with 16-32MB RAM which isn't enough to compile large programs or the kernel.