Obviously, a BD burner is an investment, I'll grant you that. However, the cost of blank BD-R's will come down. And if this format war rages on much longer, they will come down sooner rather than later.
And once you've made the initial investment in a burner, the discs themselves are cheap in comparison to a new external hard drive, at least the mini ones as you suggest. Let's also not forget that hard drives do tend to fail. Yes, they are rewriteable, but as I've said, the intention is not to have a BD be a replacement hard drive. It would be much more useful for distributing large files, or backing up your data. Data, which would be permanent and not something you'd ever want erased. Like home movies or photos, for example.
I'd much prefer to store my precious data on a disc as opposed to a hard drive which could fail much faster than a disc will. BD's aren't immortal, but with proper care they can probably outlast a hard drive by quite a while. That kind of longevity is appealing for people looking to preserve data for a long period of time.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Neil, you do bring up some good points.
Obviously, a BD burner is an investment, I'll grant you that. However, the cost of blank BD-R's will come down. And if this format war rages on much longer, they will come down sooner rather than later.
And once you've made the initial investment in a burner, the discs themselves are cheap in comparison to a new external hard drive, at least the mini ones as you suggest. Let's also not forget that hard drives do tend to fail. Yes, they are rewriteable, but as I've said, the intention is not to have a BD be a replacement hard drive. It would be much more useful for distributing large files, or backing up your data. Data, which would be permanent and not something you'd ever want erased. Like home movies or photos, for example.
I'd much prefer to store my precious data on a disc as opposed to a hard drive which could fail much faster than a disc will. BD's aren't immortal, but with proper care they can probably outlast a hard drive by quite a while. That kind of longevity is appealing for people looking to preserve data for a long period of time.