Comment Re:Why not just use hard drives and then store... (Score 1) 193
A quick on-line search show a spindle of fifty 50GB Blu-Ray discs (2.5 TB) retails for about $100. A 4TB HDD costs about $140. So HDD is actually cheaper per byte of storage.
The initial hardware is cheaper with HDDs. Operational overhead might be entirely different. An HDD needs to be plugged in all the time (consuming power) while a Blu-Ray (or DVD for that matter) does not. Also, an infrequently accessed Blu-Ray, stored properly, is likely to have a much longer shelf-life than a drive that is always powered up, leading to lower overhead in the form of replacement/recovery costs.