[sclug] Blu-Ray writing

[Daniel Craigie]

Hello all,

As the available capacity of my DroboPro steadily decreases I am going though a period of data paranoia.  Even with the dual failure redundancy provided by the disk robot, I have decided that a mass archive is required and that Blu-Ray is my best choice with the Dual Layer disks holding up to 50Gb a time.

Does anyone have any experience writing data to Blu-Ray disks?

I have a LiteON EHBU212-06 external USB3 writer and a pack of BD-R DL disks.

A quick poll of the usb bus shows that both the drive and the USB3 card seem to be functional:
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1c6b:a122 Philips & Lite-ON Digital Solutions Corporation 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub

The drive appears in /dev/ as multiple devices:
brw-rw----+ 1 root cdrom 11, 0 Jul  9 19:20 /dev/sr0

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Jul  9 19:20 /dev/cdrom -> sr0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Jul  9 19:20 /dev/cdrom1 -> sr0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Jul  9 19:20 /dev/cdrw -> sr0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Jul  9 19:20 /dev/cdrw1 -> sr0

Am I correct to assume that the duplication of both the cdrom and cdrw links reference the two layers of the disk as separate disks?

I have found sporadic info online regarding the actual process of writing data to the disks.  I'm not sure if the existing dvd writing software can cope with the amount of data that will be written to the disks, I fear buffer overflows and don't fancy having to throw away expensive & empty disks.

Any advice greatly appreciated,

Daniel