Cost per gigabyte

Highlighted below is a cost comparison guide of the most popular removable media that is available now.

As you can see below, Mediacorder® cartridges are by far the most cost effective solution compared to capacity. They also happen to be by far the highest capacity available of any known removable device.

For comparison, we have included the lowest similar capacity USB external hard drive we could find. but to be fair, External Hard disk's make a very poor transportable medium, and still are not cost effective compared to a MediaCorder.

Suprisingly, price/capacity costs of BD blanks are as much as the cost of the hard-disk. Prices are expected to fall in a couple of years. But dont expect them to see them ever to be below the 23 cents range.

Medium	MediaCorder	External Hard disk	Blu-Ray	Blu-Ray DL	HD-DVD DL	CD	DVD
Type	Tape- Magnetic	Hard disk - Magnetic	Optical	Optical	Optical	Optical	Optical
Cost (US$)(1)	$47.00	$160.00	$19.95	$47.99	$27.99	$0.25	$0.75
Capacity (GigaByte)	200GB/80GB*	200GB	25GB	50GB	30GB	0.7GB	4.7GB
Price per Gigabyte	23/58 cents	80 cents	80 cents	96 cents	93 cents	35 cents	15 cents
Archive life	30 yrs+	2-4 yrs	unknown	unknown	unknown	2-5 yrs	2-5yrs
Completely Rewritable	yes	yes	no	no	no	no	no
Can read/write natively with OS (no burning software)	yes	yes	no	no	no	no	no
Burn Failure Rate (corruption during writing)	Never fails	Never fails	unknown	unknown	unknown	1 in 10	1 in 10
Can withstand rough handling	yes	no	no	no	no	no	no

(1)Estimation only. Prices vary a lot depending on where you buy, the quantity, the quality, the brand, and the speed rating, and whether it is +R or -R.

For Blu-ray, expected prices per single blank disc to be roughly:

* Blu-ray BD-R     25GB (unformatted) write once - $17
* Blu-ray BD-R     50GB (unformatted) write once - $20
* Blu-ray BD-RE   25GB (unformatted) rewritable  - $24
* Blu-ray BD-RE   50GB (unformatted) rewritable -  $47

For HD DVD, expected prices per single blank disc to be roughly:

* HD DVD-R        15GB (unformatted) write once - $15
* HD DVD-R        30GB (unformatted) write once - $18
* HD DVD-RW    15GB (unformatted) rewritable  - $22
* HD DVD-RW    30GB (unformatted) rewritable -  $27

(*) MediaCorder technology includes 2.6:1 Hardware compression. In most other storage schemes, if it even exists, it is software based and a global function, meaning it is either all on or all off. for which practically no users can make use of when they want to mix Video and music together with data. (they compress very poorly). With HDTC this can be set on a file by file, folder by folder basis. Allowing users to mix compressed data along with already compressed Music and Video Files. This truly allows users to mostly compress, while not sacrificing anything.