Is the importance of Blu-Ray overstated?

[jalsonmi]

MikeB said:
@ jalsomni

DVD/Blu-ray player won't read disks? Disks scratched? Player won't eject?

Very uncommon problems. There are industry standards with regard to hardware reliability and nearly all DVD (excluding 360) and or Blu-Ray players have failure rates well within industry standards.

Blu-Ray disc don't scratch, unless you abuse it with a knife or something.

I know nobody with a broken DVD player, I know many people who's harddrive crashed. It happened to me at 4 times, most recently a couple of months ago I had to buy a new harddrive for my PC. The dead drive was a nice 160 GB IBM drive, very good reviews and all.

The reason why DVD drives fail or have issues so much on the 360 is because they are cheap versions of PC world drives, which are not designed to spin discs continuously at high speed like is required for 360 games. So there are more severe wearing issues which will worsen in course of time, which is also one of the reasons why many people report scratched discs.

It's worth noting that the PS3's Blu-Ray drive is better at reading old scratched DVDs, there's a good chance that old PS2 games and DVDs which fail to read on the PS2 will play just fine on the PS3.

I think brand might be your problem. IBM is OK, but not great. I do a lot of video editing, first on a Powerbook, now a Mac Book Pro, and have used Western Digital and LaCie drvies. I've never had one of those external hard drives die on me (my Powerbook's HDD died once, three years ago). Back when I had a PC (five years ago), my Dell's hard drive died a couple of times.

Meanwhile I've had several DVD players stop working for one reason or another. It's simple really--moving parts are much more susceptible to wear and failure than non-moving part based technology. A hardrive has many fewer moving parts than a DVD or Blu-Ray player--really, HDDs have none other than a fan.