M-Disc Vs. Regular HTL (Inorganic) Blu Ray For Archival. Whats The Difference?

The M-Disc was billed as an archival grade form of optical storage with unrivalled disc longevity properties of 1,000 years. The M-Disc boasted of doing so through holding an inorganic "rock like" layer. But if regular (HTL) Verbatim Blu Rays also use an inorganic layer ... what's the difference exactly? In this video I look a bit deeper into this question, discuss what's known about the M-Disc's "rock like" layer, look at MABL, and talk about some other archival grade optical media that's made it to market.
Video: Daniel Rosehill (‪@DanielSRosehill‬).

[@RockTo11]

We need someone with an electron microscope to image a BD-R and an M-Disc.

[@danielontech]

100%!!!!

[@ericlotze7724]

That and some form of spectroscopy. Also if we could find someone with access to Accelerated Aging Chamber Gear (or do another round of put it in an oven/freezer/throw it in a puddle for a year, etc) getting third party testing on all the discs would be neat!

[@Snowwie88]

1:46 - I do not totally agree with you. I have a good example here that happened in my situation. So in 2020 I went to Mexico, shot a lot of video's with my then Samsung Galaxy S9 phone. The phone recorded in 4K, 60fps, and gave an output file in the mp4 container. When I got back home, I copied all the files from my computer, also to the external backup drive, my backup/media server, my 2nd backup pc AND I burned two regular Blu-Ray discs. After a while something weird happened. Of the collection of like 30 mp4 files, 3 of them were suddenly corrupt. So I opened my external drive, also those same files, corrupt. Server and 2nd pc, even those two had the same files corrupt. But.......I was lucky that I also burned the video files to Blu-ray disc. Since these discs are only writable once and totally disconnected from the network they saved me those 3 files. Copying your files constantly from one older media to a newer one is not always a guarantee that the integrity of the file will remain solid. These days I do not only copy mp4 files to my external backup locations but also make password protected rar volumes with a reasonable amount of par files (for recovery) to be more secure. Sadly enough when I built my new pc last year I bought a case that cannot house a 5.25" optical drive anymore, and my Blu-ray writer also has died. I would love that this technique would evolve further so we can store 1TB on a single optical disc. Those discs are also less prone to external factors. One lightning strike on your house, or even in the neighborhood can generate an EMP that can totally wipe all your data, but will not affect the discs. So, optical discs for backup; I recommend it.

[@doodlebroSH]

You need a better filesystem backing your data, like ZFS.

[@craconia]

Hi Daniel. There's a podcast called "The Backup Wrap-up" (mainly enterprise storage). It has two interesting episodes on M-disc (and one of them is with Barry Lunt that you recently interviewed). In case you didn't know about...

[@danielontech]

I do indeed. I've been on the podcast a couple of times, in fact. They're a great duo. Take anyone who says that backup is boring and send them that way!

[@beosliege]

I can’t help but wonder who the guy is gonna be, 1,000 years from now, having fabricated their own laser reading device , setting down to read an m-disc found at an archaeological site to see if it really could last a thousand years. 😂 Seriously it would be really interesting to see! The M-Disc creator will be resurrected as an AI for live reactions during the momentous event. Haha, seriously I love your vids, thanks.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

The point of "1000 years" is that bad storage conditions increase the aging speed (just as there are ways to vault the disks in argon boxes to stop corrosion and all that). So those 1000 years can become 100 or 50 in hot humid conditions that would destroy a normal disk in months

[@danielontech]

Haha. Thanks for the kind words. This is sort of why I'm coming round to the idea of 100 year archival. It's a more modest marketing claim but also more reasonable. In 100 years I'll probably be a memory. If my offspring ever read this comment: please take Daniel's weird disc thingys and move them onto holographic storage or whatever the hell else you want. Please and thank you.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

"rock" is an incredibly generic term that encompasses wildly different minerals, from literal compacted sand (sedimentary rocks) to metal (pyrite) to glass-like (quartz and most crystals). In this case I'm pretty confident it's just marketing to say that they use an inorganic layer. This makes it sound better and easier to understand for laymen that would probably not grasp right away what "inorganic" means. The other text is just saying things that other disks also have, like "multiple layers of dissimilar materials" and the fact that laser heat would do physical changes when writing to punch holes. Also organic-based disks work like that, it's just how all recordable disks work (as opposed to pressed disks in mass production)

[@oliverbutterfield9844]

Hi Daniel. I really appreciate your content. I’ve resurrected an old blu ray disk burner (with M Disc logo on the front) which I never used to burn anything ever. I’m currently trying to catalog and organise the data I have, with a view to archiving some of it properly. Archival blu ray seems ideal, so I’m currently really trying to understand the actual differences in the product lines. Not so easy, it seems!

[@danielontech]

Thanks for watching and good luck with figuring it out... it's indeed a bit confusing!

[@vinishshetty8055]

When you check online for 100gb Mdisc verbatim sells unbranded 100gb blu ray discs, However are those regular BD R or Mdisc archival quality discs, This is really confusing.

[@RScesium]

Daniel. A metal nitride is an inorganic salt containing a metal and a nitride ion - N3-

[@DanielSRosehill]

Many thanks! 😊

[@fredeso7844]

I 100% agree with your opening statement regards migrating data to new media from time to time. Back in the 90s, Panasonic sold inorganic, phase-change PD discs, which had the capacity of a CD. The same technology later reappeared as DVD-RAM, a DVD-RW / +RW competitior. While these were rewritable discs, similar marketing claims about longevity echo in my mind. I had a Panasonic laptop with a PD drive in the late 90s and a DVD-R / RAM home recoder in the early 2000s. Those discs were unreliable garbage in their intended application as rewritable media, yet you won't find a bad review about them, only regurgitated marketing claims. Sounds familiar?

[@AbsurdScandal]

Were those DVD RWs bad in terms of writing more data after the first write? Or bad even in terms of writing data on them for the first time? I have a few DVD RWs whose first write went very well and kept the data for decades, but then died when I tried writing new data on them, despite the fact they were RWs.

[@fredeso7844]

@@AbsurdScandalI was talking about DVD-RAM. Similar story. The first write was usually OK, but after some rewriting they became hard to read successfully and recover the data from.

[@AbsurdScandal]

@@fredeso7844 Yeah. Disks like that are best seen as write-once disks in reality, despite their marketing.

[@EvilDaveCanada]

WARNING !!!!!!!!! Never use a backup system that relies on BOTH a proprietary Media AND proprietary hardware. I have some very old 9 track data tape. If I can find a 9 track data tape drive, then the data can be extracted. I also have a few data tapes from the early years of the PC that need a specific type of tape drive that was not widely used. The 9 track tape drives were in wide use from the 50s to the 90s and possibly even the 2000s. Big companies have their accounting data backed up on these to satisfy governments' tax data retention laws.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

All media is proprietary and so is all hardware to read it, maybe you mean "commonly used". That said M-Disk blurays can be read by any bluray player

[@dlarge6502]

Fortunately optical media is far more standardized

[@EvilDaveCanada]

​​​​@@marcogenovesi8570 I am a retired UNIX Systems Administrator and I am talking about tape backups but the warning is applicable to ALL backup media. I worked professionally in the computer field since 1981. Big Insurance Companies used to keep their data backups for up to I think 20-30 years because of IRS & similar Canadian laws. 9-track tape looks identical to the old reel-to-reel audio tapes and can be used with any 9-track tape drive as both the Tape & the drives were made to a certified specification. You would see those type of drives in old movies that had a scene in a computer room. NASA used them with everything up to at least the Space Shuttle. I retired just after all the work was completed for the Y2K issues. I don't have a HomeLab. I have a Home Network of multiple PCs running MS Windows, Linux, BSD UNIX, etc. I also have a few RP2040 based boards, a Rpi PICO, a Rpi Zero WH & a full sized Rpi(cannot remember which one) connected to my network. With that playground, I can still keep up with current consumer level gear.

[@danielontech]

"Never use a backup system that relies on BOTH a proprietary Media AND proprietary hardware" - Agree 100%. As someone pointed out recently this is also one of optical's few advantages over LTO. To date we have full compatibility between our limited formats. I flagged the Pioneer product for the sake of thoroughness. But for precisely this reason I will not personally be buying it.

[@EvilDaveCanada]

​​​​@@danielontechGood to know. I got the feeling that you were saying that that was a really good unit for making backups. Glad that I was mistaken. When I ran the computer department, we did a 100% copy of all folders from the root folder outward. The program created a file list each time. We had two folder systems, /u & /w. The system would do a rm -rf /w/* and then use the file list to copy all of /u to /w when that was done the system would then be made available to all users. Then the first(1st) of three(3) 9-track tapes would be created for /w/* with no leading /. Each tape was standalone so you didn't need to read any previous tapes in the backup to be able retrieve any file or folder that might be needed. Then the backup system would request the changing of the tape for the second(2nd) and third(3rd) tapes. We rotated our backups on a three(3) day cycle. The one created that morning went on to our shuttle truck. The one created the day before was at a totally different from where the computer system was. And the one created two days previous would be transfered to my location late afternoon. So really at no time were any of the three(3) backups at the same location. This way, if the building burnt to the ground, all we needed was to replace the industry standard hardware and load the last backup and at least our O/S, Custom Software & Data would never be list. One duplicate backup was made each six(6) months to comply with those tax laws I mentioned. We never needed it but that was most likely because it couldn't totally kill the system if it did happen. I believe in only One(1) Supreme Being, his name is Murphy and he only has one law to follow. Just always remember: Nothing is Foolproof because Fools are so Ingenious. I was trained in UNIX at AT&T Bell Labs in Denver.

[@RockTo11]

1000 year durability is good, and better than say, Sony's 50-year 128GB discs, and not just because of longevity. The reason, I think, is because that difference shows that the M-Disc having a longer lifespan means that is is more durable, and therefore would hopefully be more resistant to non-favorable environmental factors.

[@danielontech]

I would feel similarly except that I have to confess that my faith in Verbatim has kind of plummeted as of late. I think the guys behind the M-Disc project were highly innovative and very excited to share the cool science in their tech. I trust their good intentions. But Verbatim don't seem to think it's worth their time to clear up the legitimate uncertainties about the product line - and there are definite ambiguities and discrepancies in terms of claimed longevity. Optical media is a pretty small world and when companies think they don't need need to explain their tech to consumers I tend to look elsewhere (not endorsing the idea that they're selling regular stock as M-Disc but ... they're far from forthcoming about the differences between the two)

[@5520211]

I am at maximum volume but I cannot hear you

[@RockTo11]

KZbin keeps deleting my comments with links. I've found a web page from Pioneer which explains MABL, and has an electron micrograph image of the disc surface. Basically, it seems that the laser melts the metal data layer when writing.

[@RockTo11]

Using the contact page on your website, I have sent an email with the URL.

[@danielontech]

I didn't get it, I'm afraid. Would you mind sending to this one? [e-mail]

[@awdrifter3394]

None of these will last 1000 years. The plastic the disc is made from will probably degrade before 1000 years (in normal storage conditions). I think 100 years is good enough, by that time if the data is important it'll be backed up in another medium.

[@PnPride]

Personally i think that good enough, i don't treat 1000 year mark serious, rather it makes a sort of buffer - 50-100 years is good enough. I want to keep my data with me til I die. After that i don't think i would care much, for obvious reasons :)

[@maciejkowalski6045]

so basically u dont know what mdisc layer is

[@HikikomoriDev]

There is always the possibility of transhumanism... so 100 years old might not be enough.

[@MRNOFILTER718]

Definitely a marketing gimmick doesn't have anything to do with performance. In today's fast pace changing technology who would want a product to last 100 years except aliens 😂

[@Phantom_Blox]

it’s perfect for time capsules

[@BruceConsidine]

Photos easily last longer than 100 years. You'd have a supposed optical archive standard that can't compete with a 200 year old technology. Keep those originals!

[@elalemanpaisa]

good enough (in Germany for tax reasons) would be 30 years..

[@ilmari9120]

where find a real M-DISC? Verbatim no longer uses the M-DISC formula, its technology may be good but it is not the same as the "1000 years"

[@MrVidification]

Someone responded to the verbatim no longer sell real m discs post on reddit, claiming verbatim got back to them stating the formula was the same as before relating to the last batch Millenniata released. I would suspect the marketing was simply changed from 1000 to 100 because it was far more realistic. 1000 years was always overexaggerated guesswork. Anyone else with doubts over the formula should ask them, but M disc at 1000 years or even 100 might not be that useful if the drives don't last 20..