Whither optical media?

I have a bunch of stuff I want to move off my little file server - stuff I’m unlikely to need online at a moment’s notice, but don’t want to delete forever. I thought about backing it up onto dual layer DVD+R, but every brand on Amazon has tons of recent negative reviews - discs that don’t burn reliably, etc. TDK, Verbatim, Philips. Seems like production has been moved to cheaper locales with poor quality control. One reviewer made a comment that resonated: “It's 2020, and it stands to reason that blank DVD's are not as popular as they once were. We are definitely now in the autumn of the recordable media era.”

That got me thinking. $51 for Verbatim DVD+R DL 8.5GB 8X. That’s approximately 425GB of data storage ($.12/gigabyte) (some of which will inevitably get scratched, etc., unless you’re also spending another $28 or so for jewel cases). (You can go cheaper, but you get what you pay for.) About $79, then, about $.19/GB, total.

Or ... $70 for a Buffalo 500GB external SSD ($.14/GB); $80 for a Samsung drive ($.16/GB); $60 for a Crucial drive (USB-C only) ($.12/GB); $64 for Western Digital ($.13/GB). (512GB USB flash drives are about the same price, generally not as fast or robust, and I know I’d misplace them easily.) (500GB seems to be the sweet spot currently; 1TB drives are more than double the price, and 2TB drives about 6x as expensive for 4x the storage.)

No moving parts. SSDs that go through enough program/erase cycles will eventually fail (though my 2010 MacBook Air is still working fine, despite tons of use), for offline backup storage they seem ideal. No moving parts. USB ports are likely to be around a lot longer than optical drives (though I do have an external, USB-connected, DVD-RW drive, we’re back to moving parts and mechanical wear-and-tear concerns)... They take up somewhat less space than a spindle of optical discs, too (let alone the storage requirements for those discs in jewel cases! — Side note: Does anyone remember, back in the Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 days, all the hacks to get third party burners working? PatchBurn FTW.)

I think I’ve found my solution.