Is it Worth Investing in a Blu-Ray External USB Drive?

Reading post #1, I have to say no. I would put it in the I don't need it but I want it category.

bobkn said:

I keep hoping that a new, affordable, write-once archival medium with a capacity of terabytes will be developed.

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That brought back memories of the old watch once DVDs. Once the package was open they would start deteriorating.

bobkn said:

I have no idea whether an external drive could play commercial BluRay movie disks to a TV via a USB connection.

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Most if not all commercial DVDs and Blu-Ray media are encrypted and need DVD/Blu-Ray software to be able play them so I doubt it would be possible. Unless the TV isn't capable, unencrypted media on a USB drive should be playable.

bikemanI7 said:

Most of CHiPs Episodes

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I recently bought the complete CHiPs TV series on DVD for my wife. I can't give an actual number but I think about 90 to 95% of my DVD collection are older TV shows.

pseymour said:

Like AIE-DDPR.

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Holographic storage may make it to market first.

(For all you GenXers and younger, that was a promising technology in the 1960s. Fantastic prospective storage densities. HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, had holographic memory. We're still waiting for it.)

Winuser said:

Most if not all commercial DVDs and Blu-Ray media are encrypted and need DVD/Blu-Ray software to be able play them so I doubt it would be possible. Unless the TV isn't capable, unencrypted media on a USB drive should be playable.

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Ripping disks is common. You'd need a DVD or BR drive for that. And, typically, a capacious NAS to store the ripped data.

Helmut said:

I doubt if I will ever actually burn any more discs as they they are being phased out.

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Plus the fact that quality media is a thing of the past.

bobkn said:

Ripping disks is common. You'd need a DVD or BR drive for that. And, typically, a capacious NAS to store the ripped data.

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Kind of off topic but you are correct. IMO, media streaming to ones local devices is the way to go. I use Mezzmo for streaming my media to my TVs. If I activated Mezzmo with the key I bought years ago I could access my content from anywhere that I can get Internet Access. Something I doubt I'll ever use. I only bought the license to support the program.

Winuser said:

Kind of off topic but you are correct. IMO, media streaming to ones local devices is the way to go. I use Mezzmo for streaming my media to my TVs. If I activated Mezzmo with the key I bought years ago I could access my content from anywhere that I can get Internet Access. Something I doubt I'll ever use. I only bought the license to support the program.

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Ripping disks would be a current major motivation for buying an external optical drive.

It would be a small part of that ecosystem, though.

bobkn said:

Ripping disks would be a current major motivation for buying an external optical drive.

It would be a small part of that ecosystem, though.

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Referring back to the OP, they do have a USB DVD drive so if they wanted to rip their DVDs they just need the software. Going by post number one I don't feel they need to buy a Blu-Ray drive. I would recommend paying a little extra an going with a Blu-Ray drive if they want or need a new drive.

I have 5 Blu-Ray burners. I used to use them heavily. Have not touched them in a long time. The problems that I see are this:

1) Blu-ray discs are low capacity. Even double-layer discs are only 50GB.

2) They are painfully slow, especially if you use rewritable media. When I say slow, I mean it could take an hour or more to write one disc.

3) Blu-ray media is not real cheap, especially rewritable media.

4) There are a lot more issues with compatibility of media with specific drives than there ever were with CD or DVD media.

5) At the price of UFDs and HDDs, they are way more economical and much faster.

6) If you want to protect data, rather than using schemes like SecurDisc, just use BitLocker on a UFD, HDD, or SSD.

There is one rare exception: I like Blu-ray discs for long term archival of "smaller" amounts of data. The problem is that I need that so rarely that it has now been a couple years since I archived anything to optical disc.

Yeah i can look into using protecting the data with Bitlocker on one of the External drives,

Probably the Seagate 8TB Drive as that one stores the Older VHS Captured shows from many years ago, and 2nd copy on WD 4TB Black External in Drive Dock

Gonna look into Storing that Drive off site soon as well, and then just update it when i need to i think might be a wise thing to do

My older system back til i purchased my first tower without 5.25 inch drive bay in 2020, i rarely used the DVD writer when it was internal lol, maybe on occasion off and on i did. But it wasn't too often

I probably have the current External DVD Writer hooked up maybe once or twice a month if that at this point

hsehestedt said:

I have 5 Blu-Ray burners. I used to use them heavily. Have not touched them in a long time. The problems that I see are this:

1) Blu-ray discs are low capacity. Even double-layer discs are only 50GB.

2) They are painfully slow, especially if you use rewritable media. When I say slow, I mean it could take an hour or more to write one disc.

3) Blu-ray media is not real cheap, especially rewritable media.

4) There are a lot more issues with compatibility of media with specific drives than there ever were with CD or DVD media.

5) At the price of UFDs and HDDs, they are way more economical and much faster.

6) If you want to protect data, rather than using schemes like SecurDisc, just use BitLocker on a UFD, HDD, or SSD.

There is one rare exception: I like Blu-ray discs for long term archival of "smaller" amounts of data. The problem is that I need that so rarely that it has now been a couple years since I archived anything to optical disc.

Click to expand...

If you need reliable long term archival optical storage then although only 4.7GB per device DVD RAM was the way to go (not the one's though in caddies). Guaranteed lifetime at least 300 years unlike around 10 - 15 max for typical optical media and CD's.

For most people HDD's are good enough -- cost of decent high quality Toshiba 16 TB drive (should be more than enough for typical users to store literally 1000's of hours of music / video on !!!) is cheap enough to get TWO -- whatever data archive system you have it always makes sense to have at least TWO independent sources.

Those Toshiba drives are excellent too in that when not being accessed for a period they quiesce with fan off -- no noise !!! and also when quiesced consume no / minimal energy and don't run hot. OK penalty for this is when accessed again after being quiesced there's an intitial momentary lag time again as it starts up - but that's hardly a problem in normal usage though.

@bikemanI7

I also like the RSHTECH 2 bay external device so I can "replicate" two drives offline as well == for the replication / cloning function you can do it with no computer attached -- so just do the copy at night etc.

Cheers
jimbo