One of the reasons for my oft-mentioned obssession with large hard drives is that even with access to a lot of storage, I generate far more data than I can actually store on even a terabyte of hard drive space. So I end up archiving a lot of material to DVDs. And I am being serious when I mean a lot — typically I got through about 25-30 DVD+Rs a week.
Obviously the cost of DVD writers and rewriters is falling like crazy, but the cost of the media also seems to be taking a nose dive. Last Fall, media in middle-of-nowhere-Michigan cost about $1.50/disc. Now I can buy them at retail for about $.80/disc regularly, with some stores starting to offer them at $.60/disc in volume (I’m assuming if you look online you can find them cheaper than this).
Now, of course, dual layer discs are on the market and already available at a very low price point. Unfortunately the media isn’t here yet in any sort of quantity. According to this story, they’re likely to start out at $12/disc. Ouch. One of my responsibilities at my job is to oversee small-scale DVD production, and I can’t wait to be able to go with dual layers and get the full 2 hours of MPEG-2 on a DVD instead of having to chop programs into two discs or go with lower quality video.
And then further down the road is blue laser discs at 20gb on a single layer.
Excellent.