good place to buy bulk DVD's?

[steingra]

Anyone know a good place to get good quality dvd's on the cheap? I know there are lots of online places, but would prefer to purchase at a place where others have had good experience.

Im looking at purchasing 1000 of them. Going to be archiving a lot of content for the forseeable future. I have seen them as cheap as .20 cents a piece for 1000 lot. Just dont know if there are brands to stay away from.


Thanks

[src666]

Do not buy the cheap ones. If quality is important, just bite the bullet and buy Taiyo Yuden discs. I usually buy from www.supermediastore.com or www.rima.com.

[steingra]

Originally Posted by src666

Do not buy the cheap ones. If quality is important, just bite the bullet and buy Taiyo Yuden discs. I usually buy from www.supermediastore.com or www.rima.com.

Hello
Thanks for the links. So what is a Taiyo Yuden disc? I have used some Sony branded DVD-R's in the past that I purchased from OfficeMax. They seemed to work OK so far. But I really want to make sure I get the right ones, before I buy a massive quantity. What do you consider cheap?

[flavius]

I have done several hundred in the past 18 month or so, mostly memorex, the cheaper the better, using three different burner. I have seen a dozen coasters max - that includes three recent DL's on my G5 and at least four after my stand-alone panasonic got really dirty. So, I don't pay too much attention. However, research your burner(s).

[dvd_maniac]

@ flavius

the cheaper the better

You don't mean he should buy the cheapest possible DVD blanks do you?

The problem is not when you go to burn a dvd and it goes coaster on you (You still have the data on your Hard Drive at this point), the problem is when the DVD burns successfully and you delete the data and 3 months or so go by and the DVD-r won't read...

@Steingra

So what is a Taiyo Yuden disc

It is a brand name Blank DVD, and I agree that they are the most reliable. I've had very little luck with Memorex and Verbatim over the long term. TDK (Mostly CMC) has been a little better as long as I didn't go above 3.9GB but Taiyo Yuden has been the most reliable for me.

I've burned over 1000 DVDs dating back 4+ years since the first Pioneer A03 and have tried numerous blanks. Most of my research came from http://forum.doom9.org/forumdisplay.php?f=60.

[lovingHDTV]

I was just looking into this very thing. I need to archive my thousands of pictures and obviously want them to be good. I found a couple links that may help:

First is a paper by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) on BER with CD/DVD recordable media. The gist is that CD-R and DVD-R are most stable due to their chemical structure, and gold/silver colored ones are best.

http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/gipwo...ilityStudy.pdf

The second article I looked at dealt with archival of CD/DVD media. Another NIST paper for librarians/archivalists.

http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/caref...dlingGuide.pdf

Then looking around a little more, I looked at quickpar

http://www.quickpar.org.uk/

So my plan is to use the above mentioned media DVD-R, use quickpar to generate MD5 checksum files, put a copy of quickpar on the disk also and archive them in a cool dark area. Hopefully this will allow me to have my pictures for a long time. Maybe a few years down the road, re-archive them all with the current technology.

[steingra]

Thats a lot of good stuff to think about. I guess I never realized a DVD would go *bad* on you. Just from sitting around.

I would much rather pay 2x-3x as much for my DVD blanks, assuming they will last a lot longer. I never had a hollywood dvd go bad on me yet. Maybe they use the *good* ones

Seeing as I will do a lot of work to make some of my dvd's with motion menus, backgrounds, music, etc...I want them to last!!!!

Call me crazy, but since DVD-R's are pretty cheap these days, I plan on burning my sagetv mpegs to one set of dvd's, and then make my a fancy set of dvd's with menus and such. Then at some point in the future, I can just copy all the mpegs back to a really large hard drive.

Thanks again

[steingra]

Originally Posted by lovingHDTV

So my plan is to use the above mentioned media DVD-R

Which one are you referring to, I wanted to be sure.

Thanks

[flavius]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

@ flavius
You don't mean he should buy the cheapest possible DVD blanks do you?

Well, I don't go out hunting to save 2 cents per disc - if that's what you mean. I simply walk into Best Buy or so, during lunch break, and get the current deal.

The problem is not when you go to burn a dvd and it goes coaster on you (You still have the data on your Hard Drive at this point), the problem is when the DVD burns successfully and you delete the data and 3 months or so go by and the DVD-r won't read...

You guys had me scared here for a moment - I actually pulled a sample of my older discs (3 years or so) and put them in

And then I remembered that I went thru this, let's say roughly three years ago when I started to produce them in numbers..

Sure, those disc rot, as sure as we have tornados and earthquakes in New Hampshire which we do. But, did I buy insurance (can you??) ? Hell, no!

Just treat them well, buy photoresistent covers. I guess that's where I leave my money.
And don't store them in the shed.

[dvd_maniac]

I never had a hollywood dvd go bad on me yet. Maybe they use the *good* ones

They use "PRESSED" DVDs. The blanks we use burn "PITS" into a dye. 2 totally different methods. The chemical dye on blanks is fragile in comparison.

Just a tip: I try not to burn to the outer edge on blanks. I try to keep them at 3.9-4GB as the outer edge of the blank is where fingerprint damage is most likely to occur. Also some brands have a harder time reading the outer edge anyways. My 2 cents , now I'm broke.

[equalize]

I make two copies of important DVDs. One for the house, the other goes in a safety deposit box. Nothings going to happen to it in there plus you never lose it :-)

[teknubic]

Here's a good deal. 100 Taiyo Yuden 4x DVD-R for $34.61.
HTH

[steingra]

I have a dual layer burner HP dvd640 with/lightscribe. Any issues to consider with that? So far I have only burned a few 4.7 GB discs on it. I wanted to get more educated before buying any massive quantity of dvd blanks. It would be nice to use the dual layers but if they are more than 2x as expensive, I dont know if I will go that route. And are they any less reliable for long term storage? Or how compatible would they be with consumer dvd players?

This was interesting. Guess there must be problems with fakes?
http://www.supermediastore.com//taiy...e-or-real.html

I saw Best Buy ad recently, and above one of the DVD's for sale it said somethingl like "100 year archival life". Probably marketing hype right?


Well ...Thanks for all the info here. Very educational.

[patotoole]

I know this is an OLD thread but...yes...Taiyo Yuden are one of the BEST for long term..
and they just announced they are pulling OUT of the market at the end of 2015.

get them whilest you can!!

[pjpjpjpj]

Somewhat of a threadjack but covering the same topic (sorta): With my photos that I want to keep, I have a copy on my laptop hard drive, a copy on my Sage hard drive, and every 6 months or so, I have an external USB drive that I take out of the box, plug in, copy the new stuff onto it, unplug it, and put it back away. (being honest, the plan would be for it to live in the safe deposit box, but we get lazy and never take it there....)

What's riskier... DVD-R's, or an external hard drive that sits in a box all but a few hours per year?

[tmiranda]

I backup my photos to several places:
- Two drives on my Sage server (not RAIDed)
- A ReadyNAS on my network (this is a RAID array)
- Snapfish - They allow "unlimited" storage. (I'm sure there is some limit, but I haven't hit it and I have A LOT of photos.)

[flavius]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

What's riskier... DVD-R's, or an external hard drive that sits in a box all but a few hours per year?

I think that the minimum you need to have a backup of the backup. If you really can't afford to lose data, that's what you have to do. I have automated that with a secondary NAS and rsync.

[KryptoNyte]

At some point, most of you were probably media/data of some sort to CD's, but you made the upgrade to DVD's.

So that begs the question, if you really must burn something, is there any particular reason you haven't made the jump to burning blurays?

[49studebaker]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/29334...and-years.html