Music Returns to Optical Discs: BDXL Rescues Plex Server as HDD Prices Soar

Rising prices for solid-state drives and hard disks, driven by the massive build-out of data centers, have pushed enthusiasts back to optical media. The creator of the WNY Over The Air project tested how high-density BDXL discs handle hosting a music library on a Plex media server.

According to his findings, Blu-ray disc costs are once again competitive with hard drives. This applies even to archival-grade M-discs, which promise data preservation for 1000 years under ideal conditions. An added bonus of this medium is protection against accidental deletion: the Write Once Read Many technology prevents LLM agents working with the data from wiping it out, a point the author specifically emphasizes.

The key takeaway from the experiment is that after Plex indexes a disc's metadata once, an M-disc delivers sufficient speed for streaming music without any noticeable lag. Load time occurs only each time a fresh disc is inserted, but in practice swapping media is rare: 100 GB holds several thousand tracks even in lossless formats like FLAC.

The author notes that if you already have a Blu-ray drive and are short on storage, moving your music collection to optical discs could be a sensible temporary fix while drive prices normalize. However, this window of opportunity will likely close soon, bringing back the eternal question of where to store data. That said, a return to audio tape, no matter how cool a reel-to-reel would look in the server room, is unlikely.