Buying Used BDXL discs. What to expect?
On the past few days, I ordered several quantities of BDXL discs to backup my recorded videos from the past years. These projects have varying sizes and some goes up to 1TB. This means I need several of these BDXL discs to back them up.
When looking at the BDXL media on Amazon, I noticed they can be purchased “Used” straight from the Amazon Warehouse seller. A spindle of 10 discs cost $41.88, while the Used condition was at $36.85.
It’s going to be interesting to see the definition of “Used” for these discs. The description says the packaging is damaged, and Amazon’s definition for “Used – Good” items say that they may be missing items. The order description talks about some “imperfections”, which will be interesting to see exactly what it means. While the price certainly is lower, maybe it may have 8 or 9 out of 10 discs, or maybe it’s just the packaging that’s bad and that’s it. In either way, tomorrow I’ll get to know for sure once it is delivered to me.
Today, before writing this post, I noticed Amazon Warehouse had the same product, this time listed as “Used – Like New”. The price was $39.79, which is $2 and some cents off the original new price. The description says that just the packaging is damaged, which is manageable if that’s the case. The most important part for me is that the discs are fine by themselves. This item will arrive on February 6 or sooner.
While I wait for these items to arrive, I’m compressing and splitting my projects into 23.3GB parts. This allows me to store 4 of those on a single BDXL disc. I’m burning these using my old Panasonic UJ-260 slim Blu-Ray writer since my LG WH14NS40 seems to have failures sometimes. I’ve wasted some discs already due to issues with that drive, while my Panasonic drive burns them flawlessly, although at just 2x, taking about 3 hours to burn and 2 hours to verify. While the burning time is long, the important part is that these discs are burning fine and can be read back correctly. I’m burning these discs with Nero 2017 using the SecurDisc compilation option.