Is there an advantage to collecting many years supply of disk and sheltering it for future use?
No. The optical storage industry is on track for improving the area density of storage with future generations of optical drives. To take advantage of these improvements, both new drives and new media must be purchased. Since most of these improvements are expected to double the storage density (for each generation), the cost of the new hardware and media can usually be easily justified. In addition, the previous generation of media is expected to remain readily available as long as demand for it continues, so that there would actually be a penalty to stockpiling media.
