!remindme 1000 years
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wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 3 months agoM-Disks are rate for one thousand years. Unlike other writable optical meidaz it doesn’t use an organic substrate. It’s carbon glass, very stable.
YesButActuallyMaybe@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
What’s awesome is that no one alive today can disprove their marketing. I’ll stick with the tech that we’ve been using for decades. You know, the one about which we have lots of data how it performs and degrades. Because we’ve manufactured hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of them. How many people do you know using M-DISCs and how many of them have had them for decades? I can answer the second part: zero, as they came to market in 2009.
wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Just throwing the 1000 years mark is a kinda of marketing. But the cool thing is there’s actual science behind it.
But the issue with writable optical discs is that the substrate is based on organic material. These material, usually a cyano group, oxidize over time. You can help slow that does by keeping them out of the sun, prevent heat cycles, etc. But short of storing them in nitrigen they will eventually oxidize. What’s more, CDs have their data layer completely exposed on top making the problem even more pronounced. DVDs and Blu-ray at least have a layer of plastic on top of the data layer, but that’s obviously still not 100% impermeable to oxygen.
M-Discs on the other hand use a carbon glass for the data layer. Something that doesn’t oxidize. Heat cycling night form cracks in it, so yeah I would avoid significant heat/cold cycles if you want them to last, but past that they should be really fucking stable.
It is 100 years? 500? 999? Maybe, but it’s kind of irrelevant. In optimal storage conditions (which are easily achievable) they should last many lifetimes.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
Great answer. Thanks for the educational content!
wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Thanks :)
I think they are kind of neat. Large volume cold storage is a big issue for home gamers/self hosters. Storage, at scale, can be very expensive and so hard to backup. Tapes are great, but incredibly fucking expensive (the tapes no so bad, but the drives are thousands of dollars… Used!) So I really wish high capacity BluRay M-Discs were more prevalent, market at scale would easily drive down the cost of the media, and the drives are/were already cheap. Unfortunately seeing the trajectory optical medias are in right now, that’s very unlikely to happen :(