Project: BD & BDXL Archive (2026) – Media & Initial Scans (VERBATIMk, TDKBLDRNC, CMCMAGBA5, RITEKBR2)

There comes a time when you’re starting to run out of storage, so you look to buy some more but look at those flash memory and hard drive prices! Yikes! I was fortunate enough to buy a brand-new 18TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro in 2023 for AU$272 ($15/TB) including delivery from the US. Now, a 12TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro goes for AU$742 ($62/TB) and even a refurbished WD Ultrastar 18TB that is ex-datacentre goes for AU$494 ($27/TB) or thereabouts. It just feels wrong to be paying more for technology which usually falls in price rather than rises. While hard drives will age-out and mechanically become less reliable over time, I’ve decided to keep my spinning rust fleet going – but instead, move out the old, archival data that I can’t bear to just delete but probably won’t need to access frequently unless a disaster occurs to optical media instead. While I thought I wouldn’t have a reason to persist with BDXL when I first explored it, now that I have terabytes of data to move, it seems the only…