Has anyone tried or heard of this new M-Disc storage (is it new - well it's new to me)

http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

I've been using normal methods - DVD's HDD and RAID NAS boxes but this caught my eye on another forum and I wondered if it's worth getting into.

I checked Amazon and the discs are cheap here in the UK about £70 for 20!

The company that make them claim they last 1000 years, which is basically forever as far as my "pop ditties" are concerned (I'll be lucky if people are listening to them next year let alone a millennia)

I like the look of these but do I smell a white elephant?

tf

Even if they stay alive for 1000 years and people keep listening to your music till then, audio formats and generally digital audio is evloving so fast that every decade or more you gotta refresh your backups, moving them to the recent mediums that the hardwares support.

too many examples to mention. for one i was lucky enough to transfer all my DAT recordings before the last machines went down in history

True .... but,

surely a DATA disc containing .WAV's or AIFF's are going to be formats that can be read for a very, very long time to come.

DAT was the storage medium rather than the format, which was still digital audio as opposed to a propriety format that needed converting after being recorded to DAT.

I think my issue is with the longevity of the storage medium as opposed to my worry about the longevity of digital audio as a format in itself.

tf

I'm sure I read somewhere that there is a blu ray version of the m-disc coming out this spring. That's what I'm waiting for. The issue with media failure is certainly real. The organic dyes used in standard DVD media degrades on exposure to light. I've lost several discs to this and some after only 2 years.

Stewart

The media may last a thousand years, but the devices to read it will probably not be available.

Looks great, but then they said the same sort of thing about CDs at the time!

Whatever you use for data storage you have to assume it will fail, so you have to backup your data to various hard disks, cloud servers, CDs etc. If you're happy to spend £70 for this then do it, but please make it just another backup source until these things prove their worth (and even then they will probably still be just one type of backup amongst many).

Quote Trebor Flow:

---

Has anyone tried or heard of this new M-Disc storage (is it new - well it's new to me)

http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

I've been using normal methods - DVD's HDD and RAID NAS boxes but this caught my eye on another forum and I wondered if it's worth getting into.

I checked Amazon and the discs are cheap here in the UK about £70 for 20!

The company that make them claim they last 1000 years, which is basically forever as far as my "pop ditties" are concerned (I'll be lucky if people are listening to them next year let alone a millennia)



I like the look of these but do I smell a white elephant?

tf

---

Believe these claims and you'll believe anything - how do they know what'll be around in a 100 years let alone a 1000? But suffice it to say, I bought into Phillips DCC, Sony MiniDisk, the DAT tapes used to backup servers, Cd and latterly DVD and none of them have proven reliable and contemporaneous - there is someone in Readers' Ads trying to flog a LaserDisk - fat lot of use they were, even though they promised to be the 'future'

I backed up loads of stuff to DVDs when they first became affordable and when I came to recover the data from them - I got the dreaded CRC errors.

I have started to use those 500gig 2.5 SATA drives and put them in those little 2.5" USB bus powered enclosures, 500gig is quite a lot of space considering they are not much bigger than a fag packet, though I do have a couple of 2TB drives to backup the backups - but I figured 700 x £0.20p for blank DVDs = £140 - a lot more than a 500 HDD would cost, and small enough to fit in my pocket

I think the 2.5" SATA drives are probably the best way to ensure reliable backup at the moment assuming of course you spin them every so often.

Stewart

According to their infographic, hard drives only last up to five years.

Congratulations, your credibility has already expired.

--------------------
http://www.jeremycorbett.co.uk

A lot of people report hard drive failure after a few years. Five is not an unreasonable life expectancy for a high capacit drive -- I've had some last rather longer tha five years, but i've also had some that lasted only three or four years. The larger capacity drives seem less reliable and their warranties are now typically one year rather then three or five.

No media has ever proven totally reliable over long archival periods, not stone tablets, not papyrus, not stamped shellac or vinyl discs, not celluloid film, not analogue tape.... And none of the current digital/data media either.

However, Unlike analogue media, digital data can be preserved with total precision provided it is copied to fresh media before it deteriorates too far. So the secret is to set up a system whereby data is checked and copied regularly to newer storage media -- I'd suggest every five to ten years -- with backups being transferred at intermediate times, In a checkerboard kind of way.

As for the M-Disc format, it clearly has advantages over other disc formats. The strength is that the burning process results in a disc substrate with physical dents resembling a conventional pressed disc. That's partly where the claimed longevity comes from -- that and the substrate material itself. Seems like a good format to me, but it does require a special, compatible DVD drive to create discs.

However, the golden rule with data is that it is only truly safe if it exists in at least three different places at the same time!

H

--------------------
Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

It looks interesting but I wonder if any independent tests have been done? The use of DVD is interesting because it is a domestic video format as well as a data format and drives are much more widely available than DAT, Mini Disc, DCC or Zip drives ever were.

I also know for a fact that properly recorded CD-R's last for at least 17 years because that's the oldest one in my collection. Unfortunately many people's experiences with CD-R have been less favourable because they've used poorly made media in poorly made drives. Accelerated life tests predict a lifetime of around 80 years for the CD-R's that I use. Recordable DVD's haven't been around as long but I find that, again using decent media, they haven't degraded. The BBC ran some tests where they ended up recommending DVD+RW as the format most likely to last.

James.

--------------------
JRP Music - Audio Mastering and Restoration.
http://www.jrpmusic.net

The problem with archiving digital information for audio is that it is device dependent.

In still photography (including historical documents, radiographs, etc.) current thinking has been to transfer the archive to microfilm, because it is device independent and can be read optically, both now and in the future. There is no reliance on what may become obsolete technology, e.g. optical drives. The predicted life span of the media is +500 years.

Trevor

What about solid state stuff?

Not long-term reliable. Memory cards, USB sticks etc are all well known for suffering failures.

H

--------------------
Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

For digital data the most reliable way to keep your data safe is online backup. Its all backed up securely and requires no maintenance on your part.

Other than that its just best to keep everyone on hard drives, buying more every couple of years and transferring the data over. Optical drives are on the way out and they get easily lost. I can go out and buy a 4tb drive today and backup every bit of data I've got with a couple of clicks. And in a couple of years it can be copied over again to a new one. 4gb DVDS? Waste of time and space.

Quote Hugh Robjohns:

---

As for the M-Disc format, it clearly has advantages over other disc formats. The strength is that the burning process results in a disc substrate with physical dents resembling a conventional pressed disc. That's partly where the claimed longevity comes from -- that and the substrate material itself. Seems like a good format to me, but it does require a special, compatible DVD drive to create discs.
H

---

Hugh you can pick up a burner for under £14. The problem is the low capacity of CDs and the expense of the media. I think when the Blu Ray version comes out it'll be more attractive for me, however unless the media cost comes down substantially then HDDs will continue to be the most cost-effective back up solution for me. As for the M-Disc sites blurb listing HDD failure after 5 years, I will temp fate and say - not for me. Everyones experience is different and I take your point about HDD failure. I've got disks that I still use that are over 10 years old. Of course everything is backed up on other discs in case of failure.

How does SOS store/archive its material? HDD server or tape or both?

Stewart

Quote James Perrett:

---

It looks interesting but I wonder if any independent tests have been done? The use of DVD is interesting because it is a domestic video format as well as a data format and drives are much more widely available than DAT, Mini Disc, DCC or Zip drives ever were.

I also know for a fact that properly recorded CD-R's last for at least 17 years because that's the oldest one in my collection. Unfortunately many people's experiences with CD-R have been less favourable because they've used poorly made media in poorly made drives. Accelerated life tests predict a lifetime of around 80 years for the CD-R's that I use. Recordable DVD's haven't been around as long but I find that, again using decent media, they haven't degraded. The BBC ran some tests where they ended up recommending DVD+RW as the format most likely to last.

James.

---

Now you mention it James I remember Tomorrows World waxing about CDs being indestructible and lasting over 100 years. Certainly commercial Cd's seem more robust than CD-Rs. I've got audio CDs which still play fine since that CD format came out whenever that was. I wonder if the coating over the pigment in commercial audio CD's reduces the pigment degradation ? In my case the worst failure for DVD-R or CD-R has occurred after sunlight exposure. Just a thought.

Stewart

Quote scw:

---

Hugh you can pick up a burner for under £14.

---

Sure -- I didn't say it was expensive, just that you need a drive specifically designed for the purpose. I'm not aware of any new computers of any flavour that come with an M-Disc capable burner as standard.

Quote:

---

As for the M-Disc sites blurb listing HDD failure after 5 years, I will temp fate and say - not for me.

---

Ooooh! That's done it! As I said, I don't think it's a wildly inappropriate claim -- clearly there are drives that survive longer, just as there are some that have rather shorter working lives. Higher capacity drives do seem to be less reliable than older drives.

Quote:

---

How does SOS store/archive its material? HDD server or tape or both?

---

Servers and optical discs I think.

H

--------------------
Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

M-Discs use a patented technology that literally engraves data onto the disc. Since there is no organic dye layer, as most discs use, they will last much longer than 5 years (typical DVD life), 100 years (typical "gold disc" life), and even up to 1,000 years. This is according to the Eyring model. "The Eyring model has found broad application and shall be the model for estimating life expectancies of Recordable DVD systems. The equation:

t50 = AT aeΔH/Te(B+C/T)RH

where

t50 is the time to 50% media failure;
A is the pre-exponential time constant;
T a is the pre-exponential temperature factor;
ΔH is the activation energy per molecule;
k is Boltzmann's constant (1,38 × 10 -23 J/K);
T is the temperature, K;
B, C are the RH exponential constants;
RH is the relative humidity, %;" (http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/loc/overview.html)

Hard discs are prone to fail, flash drives will go bad after about 5-10 years, the cloud is insecure at best...Considering these factors, the M-Disc is the only truly reliable and permanent long term storage solution for saving important data. The only thing better than that is the fact that it now comes in Blu-Ray and is readable by any Blu-Ray optical drive. As to whether or not optical drives will be around in 1,000 years, its hard to say for certain. But even if optical drives don't exist in 1,000 years, it sure is nice to have the peace of mind that at least your data last for many generations.

You can also check out the extensive study the US Department of Defense did on the longevity of the M-Disc: China Lake Study

For more information please visit our website at: www.mdisc.com

There we go! M-Disc reports on SOS that its now available in Blu Ray. What a wonderful thing the internet is. I'm off to look for a price on it.

Quote:

---

The Eyring model has found broad application and shall be the model for estimating life expectancies of Recordable DVD systems

---

This pdf, Test Method for the Estimation of Lifetime of Optical Media for Long-term Data Storage Standard ECMA -396 gives background information about the Eyring and Arrhenius Methods and more of the theoretical basis and useful formulae.

Trevor

Quote scw:

---

I wonder if the coating over the pigment in commercial audio CD's reduces the pigment degradation ? In my case the worst failure for DVD-R or CD-R has occurred after sunlight exposure. Just a thought.

---

There is no pigment involved in commercial replicated CD's - they use physical pits stamped into the polycarbonate layer.

As you've found, the pigment in recordable media is light sensitive - that's how they work - so it is best to keep the discs in the dark at a reasonably low temperature.

James.

--------------------
JRP Music - Audio Mastering and Restoration.
http://www.jrpmusic.net