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Comment by chenxiaolong | Hacker News Reader

I've been meaning to try M-DISCs [0] after I found out that my BD drive supports burning them. Apparently, they last longer than normal discs because the drives burn "a permanent hole in the material, rather than changing the color of a dye".

I don't use optical discs much anymore, but I still like the idea of archiving things like family pictures on read-only media once in a while.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

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M-DISC is mostly irrelevant these days unless you want to use DVD for some reason.

The biggest benefit of M-DISC for DVDs was that it didn't use an organic dye, as those dyes tend to decay over time. The dominant BD-R recording mechanism (HTL) uses an inorganic recording medium so isn't affected by this problem.

There are differences in how BD-Rs are manufactured that can lead to big differences in longevity [0] but there are regular retail BD-Rs that outperform M-DISC in accelerated aging tests [1]. There are also DVD variants that outperform M-DISC [2].

Also, M-DISC hasn't produced any evidence for their BD-R discs. For their DVDs there were a few scientific studies they could point to that demonstrated their longevity, for BD-R they have no such evidence.

[0]: https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/etude-qu...

[1]: https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/etude-qu...

[2]: https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/syylex-g...

So basically I want to buy Panasonic or Sony HTL BDs for archiving and store them somewhere dark and dry?

Unfortunately that data is eight years old and I'm not even sure if Panasonic and Sony even make BD-Rs anymore. Seeing a lot of out of stock Japanese imports on Amazon.de for both of them. I can really only find Verbatim BD-Rs and they didn't really perform that well in the comparisons.

I've actually been interested in BD archiving for a bit but haven't gotten into it yet because of the initial costs. I have about 1.1 TB of data that I'd like to archive for the long-term.

They're both definitely making them. If you got to a retail store in Japan, they'll have a HUGE section filled with BD-Rs and if you search Amazon JP you can see that tons of them are in stock.

You can always import them yourself. Tenso and Buyee both work great.

I think it's just that the western market doesn't care for them much, so you don't see anybody bothering to import them for you.

x50 HTL BD-R (indicated as "non-organic") for video by SONY is sold on 3355 JPY. Possibly Amazon.co.jp supports international shipping.

https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01H8A8HH2/

Their inorganic properties of the data layer are also another big point leading to their longevity. Most other burnable media have organic data layers which essentially rust and break down in the presence of oxygen.

M-DISC is surprisingly cheap. Amazon is selling an M-DISC-capable USB drive for $22 and 4.7GB M-DISC DVD-R for $1.68 each.

The costs for getting started with BD ones are quite steep in my mind though. It's about 100 euro to get an external BD burner with M-DISC support and then like 6 euro per 25 GB disc or 20 euro for 100 GB disc. So if you were to archive 100 GB now, you'd be paying like 120 euro. 1000 GB and it's 300 euro.

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