USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

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Tinel Barb
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by Tinel Barb »

Actually I'm talking about storing data for long-term, 5 to 20 years. The (usual) best solution for this is backup on magnetic tape, because is proved that DVD's are not reliable for storing data for long term (10% failure after 5 years). Since the M-Disc technology is mature, I'm willing to switch on BD M-Discs, which are more expensive than regular BD, but more durable. That's why I bought an external M-Disc-compatible Blu-ray writer and a bunch of 25 GB M-Discs. It's shame I can't use it with QNAP.
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schumaku
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by schumaku »

Tinel Barb wrote:Actually I'm talking about storing data for long-term, 5 to 20 years.
Perfectly understand the need...
Tinel Barb wrote:The (usual) best solution for this is backup on magnetic tape,
Hm, as tapes require regular copies and massive maintenance, the only way to achieve this is by having massive tape libraries with automatic handling. Regardless, these are going towards an end ... most large IT operators I'm aware of have abandoned StorageTek or the Big Blue tape silos in the last decade already. There is a clear trend towards multi-tier storage architecture with the slowest access for cold or almost cold data being in-house and external (distributed) mostly on SMR HDDs.

I fear M-DIsk, Archive Disk, ... are being yet another"volatile" technology to follow LaserDisk, Betamax, Exabyte, ... And the licensing requirements are killers factors for any BD stuff.
hugosantos
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by hugosantos »

I own several iso images stored in my ts453mini. Is there any way to record these images using a external usb drive ?
bilik
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by bilik »

I expect that when a NAS use a multimedia SW, it will be able to play DVDs. But that's probably too logical, is not it? I have the TS-251+.
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dolbyman
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by dolbyman »

multimedia sw ? what do you mean by that?
P3R
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by P3R »

bilik wrote:I expect that when a NAS use a multimedia SW, it will be able to play DVDs. But that's probably too logical, is not it? I have the TS-251+.
The TVS-882BR and it's twin model have DVD-players (actually even BlueRay players) and since you didn't buy either of those models, I find your expectation unreasonable. But that's probably too logical, is it not?
RAID have never ever been a replacement for backups. Without backups on a different system (preferably placed at another site), you will eventually lose data!

A non-RAID configuration (including RAID 0, which isn't really RAID) with a backup on a separate media protects your data far better than any RAID-volume without backup.

All data storage consists of both the primary storage and the backups. It's your money and your data, spend the storage budget wisely or pay with your data!
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schumaku
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by schumaku »

bilik wrote:I expect that when a NAS use a multimedia SW, it will be able to play DVDs. But that's probably too logical, is not it? I have the TS-251+.
For QNAP it's not a supported feature - not even on the units coming with BD drives.

You might have more luck with current KODI which are community built and available ie. on the https://qnapclub.eu/ repository.
mjburns
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by mjburns »

Tinel Barb wrote:Actually I'm talking about storing data for long-term, 5 to 20 years. The (usual) best solution for this is backup on magnetic tape, because is proved that DVD's are not reliable for storing data for long term (10% failure after 5 years). Since the M-Disc technology is mature, I'm willing to switch on BD M-Discs, which are more expensive than regular BD, but more durable. That's why I bought an external M-Disc-compatible Blu-ray writer and a bunch of 25 GB M-Discs. It's shame I can't use it with QNAP.
In one of the courses I teach, we cover long term data retention in storage media. As of "now", your best bet is M-DISC optical disks.

Life expectancy for data stored on today's media based on accelerated lifetime tests.
Magnetic tape 10-50 years
Magnetic hard-disk drives 1-7 years
Flash drives and Solid-state drives 10-12 years
Recordable optical discs 1-25 years
Millenniata recordable optical discs (M-DISC advertised as 1,000 years, failure rate too low to measure in accelerated lifetime tests)


References
Navale, Vivek, “Predicting the Life Expectancy of Modern Tape and Optical Media”, RLG DigiNews, Aug 15, 2005, 9:4;
Van Bogart, John W.C., "Media Stability Studies," National Media Lab Technical Report RE-0017, pp. 1-86, 1994
Pinheiro, Eduardo, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Luiz André Barroso, “Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population”, Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’07), Feb 2007
Slattery, Oliver., Richard Lu, Jian Zheng, Fred Byers, Xiao Tang, "Stability Comparison of Recordable Optical Discs- A study of error rates in harsh conditions," Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, 109, 517-524, 2004
Shahani, Chandru J., Basil Manns, Michele Youket, “Longevity of CD Media: Research at the Library of Congress”, Preservation Research and Testing Division, Washington, DC
Byers, Fred, “Optical Discs for Archiving”, Information Technology Laboratory, Information Access Division, NIST, OSTA, Dec 6, 2004.
Iraci, Joe, “The Relative Stabilities of Optical Disc Formats”, Restaurator: International Journal for the Preservation of Library and Archival Material, 2005, 26:2, 134-150.
Tanaka, Kunimaro, “Toward Adoption of Optical Disks for Preservation of Digitized Cultural Heritage”, Proceedings of 2008 Optical Data Storage Conference, Honolulu, HI.
Svrcek, Ivan, “Accelerated Life Cycle Comparison of Millenniata Archival DVD”, Life Cycle and Environmental Engineering Branch, Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, China Lake, CA, Nov 10, 2009

As for using an Blu-Ray burner with your QNAP, I use mine via a Windows virtual machine. But it's slow & inefficient compared to how it would be if the QNAP natively supported the burner. If you have Windows do the burning, it wants to first copy the files into a temporary directory within the VM, then burn to the drive, which takes a long time if you are burning a lot of files. (I burn 50GB disks routinely.) Other utilities (e.g. BurnAware) can burn directly, but my observation is that it's still slower than it should be.
Past or present NAS's: QNAP TS-221 (RAID 1), QNAP TS-251-8G (RAID 1), QNAP TS-253 Pro (8GB RAM, RAID 1), QNAP TS-563 (16GB RAM, QM2-2S SSD w/r cache, 4x6TB RAID 10 & 1x500MB SSD RAID 0), QNAP TS-473 (64GB RAM, QM2-2S SSD w/r cache, 4x6TB RAID 10 & 2TB SSD RAID 0) & Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (RAID 1)

Professor & founder of a computer security company sold off over a dozen years ago.
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by schumaku »

mjburns wrote:In one of the courses I teach, we cover long term data retention in storage media. As of "now", your best bet is M-DISC optical disks.
The only "fun" remaining in a few years or decades is to find the hardware to read any of these media and the used archive formats...
bilik
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by bilik »

P3R wrote:The TVS-882BR and it's twin model have DVD-players (actually even BlueRay players) and since you didn't buy either of those models, I find your expectation unreasonable.
Use your TS-251+ as a multi-zone multimedia system to fill every corner of your house with your choice of media
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dolbyman
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by dolbyman »

no bluray support due to the necessity of DRM ... QNAPs do not support any DRM

buy a Bluray player .. or just serve 4k rips from files (with DRM stripped)
bilik
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by bilik »

dolbyman wrote:no bluray support due to the necessity of DRM ... QNAPs do not support any DRM

buy a Bluray player .. or just serve 4k rips from files (with DRM stripped)
I'm not talking about blueray. I could support DVD and CD. Mainly shared network installation CDROM.
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by P3R »

bilik wrote:
Use your TS-251+ as a multi-zone multimedia system to fill every corner of your house with your choice of media
And based on that you you expect third party hardware to be supported? I agree that they don't spell it out but of course they mean all media that's stored on the NAS, not unlimited hardware support.

I have much vinyl and VHS. Is it reasonable for me to be mad that can't be played on my NAS as well?
RAID have never ever been a replacement for backups. Without backups on a different system (preferably placed at another site), you will eventually lose data!

A non-RAID configuration (including RAID 0, which isn't really RAID) with a backup on a separate media protects your data far better than any RAID-volume without backup.

All data storage consists of both the primary storage and the backups. It's your money and your data, spend the storage budget wisely or pay with your data!
pemhak
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by pemhak »

Here might be solution to use optical drive with a at least QNAP TS-459 Pro 2 (maybe others as well).

1. First goto https://www.virtualhere.com/nas_faq
2. And then goto https://www.virtualhere.com/usb_client_software

Sincerely pemhak
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Re: USB External DVD/Blu-ray Drive support

Post by OneCD »

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