Just wading into the fray over HDD vs BR vs tape. As I see it, with per GB savings at 50% and steadily rising, it makes more sense to use HDDs and double them for redundancy. I edit video, so my storage needs are massive. BR for data storage has been too slow out of the gate to capture the market--it's still too expensive and not ubiquitous. Also, let's face it, 50GB is next year's Zip Drive. It's just not sufficiently robust, (size, speed, price) to be a serious player in the storage market. Even though it appears to be the future of video distribution, I doubt that we'll be using plastic disks at all in five years, thank goodness.
I disagree. Blu-ray is intended as a format for consumption of HD video, first of all. Its data use is a secondary (though welcome) consideration. Second, TDK & co. have already boosted Blu-ray discs to 200 GB. And as mentioned, shipping out a bunch of HDDs to 20-30 people is a lousy way to move footage to them. And, as it has been mentioned several times, BDs have been adopted at a rate that far outstrips how long it took DVDs to get a foot in the door. Speaking as an editor myself, I think it would be more convenient to back a whole (SD) completed project up to a single BD-R and leave it at that than it would be to have a rack of HDDs in the back of my limited space to poke through every time I need something. Once the drive is paid for, the cost of discs isn't that much. After all, miniDV tapes run $2.50 per for 13.6 GB of storage. You're up to $7.50 for tapes rated for HDV. BD seems increasingly reasonable in the face of these costs and it's dropping consistently.