M-DISC™ Forever Storage Bluray and DVD up to 1000 years storage.

Be aware that an M-Disc compatible writer is required and a compatibly list is on the m-disc website.

http://www.mdisc.com/

John.

 

Not bad.

 

Petroglyphs?

 

I was actually looking into these as a means to archive some of my older data. My main beef is the price.

A 50-pack of 25GB blurays cost $220 on Amazon. Or 15-pack for $67. Either way this works out to $0.18/GB. When you account for the fact that you'll have wasted space and a few coasters, the cost will be over $0.20/GB.

For DVDs it's even worse. $60 for a 25-pack comes out to over $0.50/GB.

For comparison, SSDs nowadays are almost as low as $0.35/GB, flash storage is <$0.30/GB, and hard drives are about $0.03/GB. Normal blu-rays typically come in under $0.04/GB, and DVDs are under $0.06/GB.

I understand that there should be a price premium, but almost a factor of 10 is quite ridiculous, especially for a format that's staring obsolescence in the face.

 

Bah. If I need something that'll last for many thousands of years, this would be a better option imo:

 

Blank 4.7gb dvd`s are only £2.40 each , not too bad to protect you wedding photo`s ect, also prices will come down.

The price of normal blank dvd`s and bluray`s were a fortune when they first came out as well.

John.

 

1000 years? Sounds dubious. Maybe in perfect conditions. Their life expectancy for other forms of data storage seems to be in a worst case scenario, however.

The prices of normal blank discs were driven down by competitive market forces. These special discs are from a single supplier. The only way prices will go down is if nobody wants them.

 

The blank dvd`s were made by Traxdata i quoted for £2.40 each.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/like/3310...3=1&ff11=ICEP3.0.0-L&ff12=67&ff13=80&ff14=108

John.

 

Optical media is a ticking time bomb. I would never back up to optical media unless it was temporary duplicate storage or to sneaker net it to someone.

 

@HTWingNut , I'm looking to build some NAS Storage.. What exactly is your set up? Just wondering..

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...llet-and-bought-my-new-whs-2011-build.701517/

Except swap WD Green for WD Red for my backup drives.

 

Proven to last 1000 years... that means they've been around since 1015 AD. Sounds unlikely. To use the old Knuth quote, "I've only proven it correct, not tested it."

My Blu-Ray player supports M-Disc, too (probably only writing the DVD version), but I didn't choose it because of that, rather because it was the cheapest Blu-Ray player in the store. If I planned to do long-term archiving on optical media, it might be worth it. As it is, it's more convenient to just use multiple hard drives and run out to Micro Center to buy another when one fails. I did back some files up to DVD last summer, but it was only a temporary thing so I wasn't hosed if my backup drive failed while I was reinstalling my main drive.

The other problem with the 1000 year claim is who knows if today's optical media will be readable in 1000 years. Given the history of various tape drives, SCSI-connected drives, 8" and 5.25" (and soon 3.5") floppy drives, ZIP drives, etc. - I'd have to put my money on "probably not". I might even be willing to place a bet on it despite it being unlikely that I'll live 1000 years, since it may well happen that within 40 years or so DVDs and Blu-Rays are obsolete. CD-ROMs are doing pretty well for still being common after 30 years, but they're more the exception than the rule, and it's in no small part due to having the music industry behind them. 8-tracks, cassettes, Betamax, HD-DVD, etc. all quickly fell into oblivion once industry support dried up, and vinyl very nearly did too.

So if I wanted to make sure my magnum opus would last 1000 years, I'd do like Jarhead and shell out for having it engraved on a stone tablet.

I think you mean the M-Disc Blu-Ray and DVD prices? I picked the first 25-pack of Blu-Rays I found on Amazon today, at http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Blu-...8&qid=1426723950&sr=8-1&keywords=blu-ray+disc, and they cost $25 shipped without Prime, or 4 cents/GB. By that comparison, it's a fivefold difference - which is steep, but possibly acceptable if time (which you'll save from re-burning or burning multiple copies) is more important than money.

As for coasters, you might not get any coasters. The mainstream thinking is you get a couple coasters with a 25-pack of optical discs, and that's true for mainstream discs like the one I linked to. But ones with higher manufacturing quality tend to have fewer coasters. I bought a 100-pack of Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs a couple years ago, of which I've gone through 50-60. So far, I've had zero coasters. And none of the discs I have burned have failed, either, even though a lot of them have been living in my car - far from an ideal environment. They do cost more ($25.50/100 vs. $15 for 100 Verbatim CD-Rs at MicroCenter... which actually has notably better prices than Amazon after you add in shipping), but it's nice not having any coasters.

The particular CD-Rs I bought are these: http://www.amazon.com/JVC-Taiyo-Yud...F8&qid=1426724584&sr=8-2&keywords=taiyo+yuden . They're actually 40 cents cheaper than when I bought them. I would buy them again; at the rate I use them it's a couple bucks a year for never having coasters.

 

I know that it is hard to test, but Blu ray recorable disc's have a much more durable coating than DVD'd, I would suspect that any blu ray recordable disc is going to a very long life. You can get these much cheaper from digistor:

http://www.digistor.com/Blu-ray-Recordable-Media


Digistor already has 25gb, 50gb and 100gb (128gb 4 layer) discs.

 

It may have a more durable coating but it is still recordable media. What a lot of people don't realize is that recordable media and manufactured media are entirely different. Manufactured DVD's and Blu-Ray's are physically stamped with the pits for playback by a machine. Recordable are etched by a different chemical layer that is easily burned by laser. This burnable layer is easily susceptible to high heat and humidity, direct sunlight, physical elements and just ages/deteriorates fairly quickly. More layers is also more likely to failure as well.

Burnable optical media is not a good solution for backup IMHO. It's too susceptible to errors while burning, easily damaged by the elements (like too high heat/humidity) and time, and generally need to be handled gingerly to eliminate risk of physical damage. If I were to have to use burnable media, I would make at least 3 backups every time for redundancy because I guarantee that one will go bad eventually. I know many people that burned their family photos on a Blu-Ray or DVD thinking they were safe and go to load them 5 years later and can't read the disc. It was their only copy.

I ended up building a home server because of backup issues and having lost important data in the distant past from DVD-R's even BD-R's. I built two actually, one for my home and one to keep at my sister's house, and they cross backup. Investment was about $2500, but considering I have dynamic storage, with local backup and backup at my sister's house, I'm safe. $2500 for about 5TB of data so far between my sister and myself equates to $0.50/GB, and it's flexible and dynamic. Plus I've run the duplicate servers for a few years now, which means total cost over time has gone down considerably. And my most critical data gets duplicated again on a portable hard drive, two actually, one that I keep at my mom's house, and I swap it every time I visit with updated data.

Burnable media is dead.

 

I highly doubt your $/GB would look good on this thing.

 

Would be cheaper over the long-run though. HDD/SSD prices per GB will build up as you are forced to replace the drives .

 

The write speed would be like 10 bytes an hour.