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M-Disc


Penzoline

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http://millenniata.com/

 

 

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M-Disc is a DVD made out of stone that lasts 1,000 years

 

the Millenniata M-Disc, which is basically a 4.7GB DVD with a data layer made out of stone-like metals and metalloids.

The idea is that conventional, home-made optical discs have a very soft recording/data layer that isn’t very resistant to heat, humidity and light, while the M-Disc on the other hand has a much tougher data layer that can withstand the test of time.

 

M-Discs can’t be burnt with your current DVD burner — melting stone requires a laser that’s five times stronger than normal! — but on the flip side, M-Discs are backwards compatible and can be read by normal DVD drives.

 

25 different discs, including the M-Disc, were exposed to 85C (185F) temperatures, 85% humidity, and bright, full-spectrum light for 24 hours.

Where every other archival-quality recordable DVD failed the test with thousands of read errors and complete loss of data, the M-Disc passed with full data integrity and just a handful of errors.

 

Millenniata even goes on to say that the stone layer of its DVDs should retain data for over 10,000 years — but the polycarbonate coating is only good for 1,000 years.

Still, both figures are just slightly larger than the 5-10 year average lifespan of hard drives, recordable DVDs, and flash drives.

 

at around $7 per disk, the M-Disc is incredibly expensive for just 4.7GB of storage.

Next, to use M-Discs as your primary backup medium, you would need vast amounts of space to store the discs: to back up just 10 terabytes (one Library of Congress) you would need 2,130 M-Discs, which would occupy about the same space as 10 hard drives — and it’s safe to assume that the US Department of Defense, or any other big institution, has petabytes rather than terabytes of data to back up.

 

Finally, if you want to read your archive of M-Discs in 1,000 years, you’ll need to find a DVD player. In a day and age where floppy disks were created and destroyed in 20 years, and optical discs are fast being ushered out of existence by portable form factors like the smartphone, tablet, and MacBook Air, do you really want to push all of your chips towards M-Disc? Rather than regularly copying backups from one medium to another to ensure integrity and contemporaneity — which is how it’s done today — are you sure that it’s wise to spend thousands of dollars on a storage medium that might be antiquated in just a few years?

Prices:

http://store.millenniata.com/default.aspx

 

 

I'll be definitely getting this. I definitely agree with the negative points the quote is saying, but they matter to me none. Perfect for archiving files you really want to preserve.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hey, this is good. Especially because it can be read by normal DVD drives.

I knew that there are other archival possibilities such as the Rosetta Disk, but they're unusable for the average person. But this is. Great thing.

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Well, I for my part do have data which I would be happy to last longer than 10 years. My holiday photos for example.

 

It actually would be ideal if there was a service that burns you data on M-Discs ... this way you don't have to afford the M-Disc drive itself, which would probably cost a fortune.

 

And yes, I know there are certain archival services already, but they take monthly fees afaik. Plus the M-Disc will be accessible for me even if the net was down one day or anything...

 

M-Disc burning on request ... hope we will see something like that one day.

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Well, I for my part do have data which I would be happy to last longer than 10 years. My holiday photos for example.

 

It actually would be ideal if there was a service that burns you data on M-Discs ... this way you don't have to afford the M-Disc drive itself, which would probably cost a fortune.

 

And yes, I know there are certain archival services already, but they take monthly fees afaik. Plus the M-Disc will be accessible for me even if the net was down one day or anything...

 

M-Disc burning on request ... hope we will see something like that one day.

 

According to the website, the cheapest drive that can burn M-discs is $49.98. The most expensive one can write blurays, dvd's, mdiscs and cd's and it's only $200.
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Omfg, that's ridiculously cheap.

 

But if it's so cheap, the question is if this is actually really holding the promises...

 

Or are the disks helluva expensive then?

 

I know, I know, "exposed to 85C (185F) temperatures, 85% humidity, and bright, full-spectrum light for 24 hours." and it was still readable ... but if it really holds it you only gonna see if you make a stronger endurance test.

I took a lecture on data preservation and there they told us that there's funghi who feed off the data layer material of CDs/DVDs. Can MDisk also battle that?

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The quote he posted said $7 per disc, which is relatively expensive but still less than DVD-R's were when they were released.

 

OK, RTP is too stupid to read in this case :D

 

So we have cheap writer and cheap medium?! So that would actually mean ... a PANACEA?

 

Is it really?

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