M-DISC – DVD/Blu-ray compatible discs that may last up to 1000 years

1970-01-01•4 minutes ago

This is the only storage media I trust to outlive me. Everything else, including paper, will degrade.

tambourine_man•6 minutes ago

Every few years or so I flirt with the idea of backing up to M-Disks. Then I remember how slow and low density they are.

For recording and forgetting, I recently played with LTO, again.

But I always end up at local HDD + remote AWS Glacier.

noinsight•about 1 hour ago

The drives to read them (Blu-rays) will be the problem. Pioneer stopped manufacturing them in 2024, only LG drives are available now.

Coincidentally I just bought one, they’ve doubled in price now recently.

Also bought some M-Discs to try. They’re half the price in Japan (Amazon) compared to Germany.

QuantumNomad_•18 minutes ago

In a 1000 years even if they don’t have the drives, as long as they still know roughly how it works maybe they will photograph it with a microscope and read the tracks in the M-Disc from that. Then they will have to decode it also of course.

bluGill•9 minutes ago

Maybe. The question is why are we needing to read these disks in a thousand years. I would guess right now that the most likely case is information we care about is archived on modern formats such as hard drives, which are constantly being copied to different drives as the old ones go out and so in a thousand years they'll still have all the data in a much more accessible format than a very obsolete disk.

If, instead, we are talking about some human disaster and, that constant copies is lost at some point, we're kind of stuck. I don't think the technology to read those disks will exist either, even though in theory, yes, that could be done. It would be a massive reverse engineering effort and I don't think they will even know to start doing that with these weird disks that the agents had.

If you want something archived for a thousand years, well, we know that clay tablets baked worked, although we sometimes can't read the letters but at least seeing something with the eyes says there's something and if there's enough of them we have decoded language.

The best archival paper in ideal conditions lasts more than a thousand years, but in more typical storage, we can't store paper that long. Paper has only been stored successfully in Egypt for that long. I'm sure there are other deserts though that would count just as well.

msephton•about 1 hour ago

I have a few of these drives. They also rip discs very accurately. Bit-identical to my Plextor, at a fraction of the price. But sadly no ripping software offers these the verification logging that is required for redump approval.

tim--•36 minutes ago

> Verbatim Japan claims that M-DISCs now use a titanium layer to prevent moisture ingression and to provide environmental stability

From what I understand, Verbatim no longer manufactures true M-DISC media. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1i0ky6v/what_h...

It's all just MABL now.

numpad0•about 1 hour ago

I wonder why every types of discs seem to be entering a de facto deprecated state over the last ~10 years, especially inorganic types are. Is it simply because everyone's on Netflix? Or could it be environmental/material cost issues?

I believe these discs are made by transferring materials by vaporizing them in a series of big vacuum chambers, maybe those materials are toxic and/or China dominated and nobody wants to deal with them anymore?

Avamander•about 1 hour ago

There's just no mass-market appeal?

Large storage hyperscalers or whatever just use tape?

I can't wait for tape patents to expire.

splix•24 minutes ago

Even the largest 100GB disk seems too small nowadays

sehw•about 1 hour ago

I bought 3 burners and burn 2x copies of every 100GB disc. Only Verbatim burners seem to not fail with 50+Gb discs. By the way!

hulitu•3 days ago

> M-DISC – DVD/Blu-ray compatible discs

citation needed. My DVD/Blu-ray writer does not support M-DISC

> may last up to 1000 years

or may not. Who knows ?

ricardobeat•about 2 hours ago

The discs are entirely compliant with the Blu-Ray spec, there is no “compatibility” mark; anything made in the past 10-15 years should work fine. Your writer may be out of spec?

Apparently original M-Disc DVDs required a more powerful laser than normal, but that is not the case for Blu-Ray.

buckle8017•about 1 hour ago

Confusingly you need an MDISC writer for some but not all disks.

Any bluray reader will work to read tho.

M-DISC – DVD/Blu-ray compatible discs that may last up to 1000 years

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