M-Disc Blu-Ray Is Coming!

[L. Langer]

I've not used burnable media in years... but that's partly because it's not really 'permanent'. This technology might get me to take another look... but there's more to long term archival than just reliable media. Do they have a proposal for long term access to the media? I'd expect a comprehensive solution to include some sort of future-proof (or at least future resistant) access technique. It'd likely be some sort of compact OS also burned onto permanent media (or in firmware) that boots on an included hardened hardware platform and provides a robust way to read the disks and get the data out to (likely) multiple I/O methods (Ethernet, USB, Thunderbolt, Wireless, etc) so that there's a good chance that in 20 years when the company is long out of business and the disk access devices are long out of production there's a chance that one of the interface technologies will be usable (maybe with conversion) so you can get data out of the system.

If it doesn't do that then I'm not sure I see much advantage relative to a properly implemented and maintained redundant disk storage system... and it's likely to be quite a bit more expensive due to media cost.

There are a whole lot of academics working on the long term data archival challenge... not a simple problem.

Optical media isn't going away any time soon and backwards compatibility is built into it by design, so there's nothing to worry about, especially since BD/CD/DVD has such a huge industry behind it. If it somehow does go away or become superseded by something else, you'll have plenty of time to migrate data with fair warning since M-Discs work with ANY BD drive. You can still buy ATA, parallel port, and Firewire cards, despite those interfaces being ancient and unused on new hardware for the most part, so it's unreasonable to think that interfaces we currently use in hardware will simply vanish into thin air once Thunderbolt 7 or eWSATA comes out.

 

[David Kuhn]

It won't vanish overnight... but it will vanish. You can niggle about the timing (what does 'any time soon' mean), but it will happen. The difficulty of getting at your data will increase... from plug and play... to buy a card/adapter and software... scour ebay for someone selling old hardware... to make sure you've got an old OS you can run that includes support for it... to pay someone a ton of money to extract the data because there's no other way to get it.

It might take more than 20 years... but that depends a lot on how popular the medium becomes. I've got a lot of old hardware sitting around that is now difficult to use... some from lack of interfaces... many due to lack of driver support (try getting a scsi laser printer running on Windows 7). These issues will eventually affect even mainstream standards like drive interfaces... it's just a matter of time. If a standard writable bluray disk will last 30-100 years and you're thinking about paying a premium for a more durable medium then you're expecting to want to save your data for more than 30 years. That timespan covers nearly the entire PC 'revolution' going to 1985... so given the number of "original ibm 8086 pc" hardware devices that you'd not be able to use today and not be able to make usable for less than a LOT of money, I'd say the likelihood of having this issue is fairly high.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

M-Disc BDXL discs will come next year and might get shown off at CES. 100GB single-side discs and 200GB double-sided discs are coming. I've been using the current generation of single-layer discs for backing up massive amounts - several discs a week - of data over the past several months and haven't had any issues at all.

I was just going to point out if double sided was possible, or increased single sided capacity discs. But what happens when UV ray format comes out, the capacity will be pretty nice. What happens when a writable UV ray disk gets left in the sun?

 

[L. Langer]

I was just going to point out if double sided was possible, or increased single sided capacity discs. But what happens when UV ray format comes out, the capacity will be pretty nice. What happens when a writable UV ray disk gets left in the sun?

Most likely nothing will happen unless you happen to store your discs in no cases, inside a tanning bed that you leave on at the highest setting for a few decades. I'm pretty sure nobody does that, but don't quote me on it. Older discs are only UV-sensitive because of the organic materials used and that's not really a problem any more since BD was designed with inorganic materials in mind. In the case of M-Disc discs, the discs are rock solid because they literally are comprised of a solid rock-like material for the recording layer, which gives them durability and makes them suitable for long-term archiving. M-Discs have passed every single test for durability and long-term reliability used today, so that's why they are used by the DoD and a lot of others for long-term back-up.

 

[L. Langer]

100GB BD-XL M-Disc discs from Verbatim hit the market this month and 50GB BD-R discs will hit soon after. Discs are fully compatible with existing burners that support those formats and they should work fine in the upcoming UHD Blu-Ray players.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Cool, got one

Anyway, the UV thing was that old CD etc uv sensitive discs had issues. If that is no longer the case, good.