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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

M-Disc Blu-Ray Is Coming!

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L. Langer

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I'm sure some of you are familiar with M-Disc and their special archival media but for those of you who aren't, they are an optical disc design that uses burners that physically engrave the surface of the disc with the laser instead of the old school dye and they are fully compatible with normal DVD and Blu-Ray drives, assuming you burn the disc using all the standard file systems and such. Until now, only single-layer DVD media has been available but in the next several months, they intend to release single-layer Blu-Ray media that uses the M-Disc process, which is what many people who know of the tech have been waiting for. I don't have an exact date yet but Spring looks like it might be the launch time and Dell is now equipping their workstations with M-Disc Blu-Ray burners from LG.
 
Michael Schrengohst said:
Discs are so 20th century
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What are you using instead? M-Disk Bluray seems like a better system than LTO for ease of use, storage, and wear and tear (you can only read an LTO so many times before the tape starts to wear down, where as, reading a M disk does not wear down the disk.)
 
Well, a 1000 years of permanent data storage seems pretty good to me... ;)

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m_disc_vs_dvd.png
 
Jason Diamond said:
is that still gonna be limited to 50gb's?
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From what I know, they do not have multi-layer M-Disc media because it is not possible due to the fact that it is a surface engraved medium and not a dye-based medium like old school DVD-R media.
 
They are testing the Blu-Ray media at the moment, so no pricing information is available until that is complete and mass manufacturing begins.
 
Good point. Unless you're an idiot like me who tends to stockpile backup media in advance for a client and then gets stuck with 100 or so virgin disks they can no longer write to. Ouch!

And it does have DoD certification for use under 'extreme' conditions, so that counts for something.

And to your earlier point about LG drives I'll concur 100%. They've worked well for me too. And at <$100 for the writer, and ~$3 per M-disc, it makes for an attractive price/benefit ratio. Especially if they can get the disc capacity up to dual layer at least. And it really is as permanent as they say it is.

I did notice some reviewers mentioned m-discs give off an odd odor that smells something like film developer. Since film developer contains phenols and benzene (which give it that characteristic smell) I wonder if whatever is causing that odor might have the potential to cause damage to other media if stored in the same cabinet.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
If it's single layer then it's 25GB per disk. A 2TB 10bit 4k film would take about 40 disks.
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Actually, I think it's 4.7Gig per disc. Ouch.


P.S. Oaky, I now realize that the whole point of this thread is a Blu-Ray version is coming soon. By bad... duh!
 
The advantage to M-Disc -- it's the ability to create the equivalent of a "gold master" etched and pressed disc on your desktop at relatively low cost.

Disadvantages: Slow, small storage capacity, high cost per GB in relation to most other forms of media.


I can see some advantages here for critical documents and small data sets. For everything else, it's just not practical, even at the forthcoming 25GB Blu-Ray size, it would take 40 discs to equate to a single 1TB hard drive. 30 discs to equate to a single LTO-4 tape. This tech is somewhat interesting, but not the answer.
 
I think it could be the answer for certain data sets.
- Photo collections. Ideally we'd all like to be able to access our photos 10-20 years down the line. Perhaps this is a more reliable way to do so.
- Documents. Business and important personal documents
- Short form video masters.
- compressed video formats. create an archive backup of each camera original media card. obviously this is less useful with cameras like Red and Alexa.
- music libraries, especially music purchased online
 
I think its a very good medium as it the only that offers long shelf life.. even if you have to span your data across many disks..
as if you really want to have a cheap affordable solid backup solution, this is the only option in the wild..
maybe the only alternative would be slc ssds.. and they're starting to get cheaper these days, but again, these M disks would solve many miseries of life as Steve noted many application, and uselessness for large camera files, they are (in my opinion) perfect for Compressed HD workflow backup and mastering..
 
25GB single-layer Blu-Ray recordable M-Disc media will be available in June. All existing M-Disc Blu-Ray burners - meaning those that record to standard Blu-Ray recordable discs - will have firmware updates for the new media.
 
M-Disc is all hype, the Blu-Ray form offers very few of the promised enhancements to make the M-Disc truly better -- case in point, it can be written to with the same low-power diode laser that writes most dual-layer BD-RE discs now. They're still vulnerable to sunlight and most other things that can damage a recordable optical disc. Practical utility of the format is extremely limited Transfer rates are low, capacity is crippling, and excruciatingly small next to the cost. The vast majority of players on the market will not receive firmware updates as the M-Disc people like to say, your primary hardware suppliers don't work that way and will have little interest or reason to provide this. Not that it's a big deal, new drives are cheap anyway.

Sure LTO has its weaknesses, so does every other format, including these new Blu M-Dicss. I guess it's nice to see there's another option out there for when high capacity and transfer speeds or light exposure don't matter. I honestly don't see myself using them.
 
M-Disc 25GB Blu-Ray is coming in August. 50GB sometime next Spring or Summer. :001_cool: They will be compatible with existing Blu burners.
 
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'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.
 
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