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After I saw this on James Hamilton's blog the other day I did a quick check of BD-R versus 4TB HDDs cost per GB. Using whatever I could find after about 5 minutes of looking around, I came up with $0.05/GB for both types of media.

If anyone can provide a link to BD media for sale at a price that make this economical I'd be interested to know.

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I would think the media's longevity factors into the lifetime cost. If the optical media is certified for 50+ years, that essentially means they won't have a need to recopy data if for some reason they want to preserve it.. for a long time.. I don't know how long magnetic tape lasts, but I would imagine it would be a huge pain to need to keep backing up old tapes to new tapes every X years.

The saving is in power consumption for cold storage.

Are modern hard drives not rated to survive very long in spun-down, powered-down condition?

Exactly. This is low power consumption for infrequently accessed data.

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