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AdvprosD
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| Posted: 29 July 2023 at 12:26pm | IP Logged
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I've been seeing these pop up more often in my searches for blank media.
Has anyone used them for archiving? I've seen claims that they have a much better shelf life than nearly all other types of media.
It would seem to me that you'd also have to have an M-Disc reader on hand for a few centuries till they fail.
Just another fancy Blu-Ray format? or possibly something worthwhile?
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crapfromthepast
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| Posted: 31 July 2023 at 10:57am | IP Logged
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Dave - I was an engineer who worked in optical data storage many years ago.
My two cents: It's a gimmick. The M-Discs themselves may have an absurdly long lifetime without degrading, but the disc readers will be obsolete way before then. There's essentially no money to be made in optical disc reader/writers at this point, so it's only a matter of time before they're discontinued. (Are there any floppy disk manufacturers still out there? A floppy disk with a 1,000-year lifetime still isn't all that useful.)
What I'd recommend is writing your tracks to a well-supported medium now (USB external hard drives are a good choice for now), and migrating them from medium to medium as technology changes and evolves.
For example: In 1995, my Ph.D. dissertation took up ten floppies, and had filenames that had to conform to the 8.3 naming convention. I eventually wrote them to a CD-R, then moved them to an external hard drive, then moved them to cloud-based storage.
At present, cloud-based storage isn't quite ready for multi-terabyte audio collections, but I expect that at some point it will be. When it is ready, you don't want to be left with thousands of optical discs to rip.
Again, just my two cents.
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aaronk
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| Posted: 31 July 2023 at 11:46am | IP Logged
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Looking into the M-Disc format, it appears it's been around since 2009, and the discs themselves will play in any Blu-Ray player. They are also pretty inexpensive considering the amount of data that can be stored. I read that early uses were for government documents that needed to be stored for a very long time without fear of discs becoming unreadable.
While Ron brings up the most logical and valid points regarding data storage, some of us might take comfort in knowing that we could store a whole terabite of data on 10 discs that could then be stored in a different location from our homes as backups. Drives often fail; just ask anyone of us here on the forum. I've also have many CD-Rs in my collection that are no longer readable. Even a handful factory pressed-discs in my collection have gone bad over the years.
Realistically, I probably won't take time to archive my music collection on M-Disc, but I do find it interesting that, for example, I could archive 7,500 CD singles onto 10 M-Discs and not have to worry that they will deteriorate.
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Aaron Kannowski
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EdisonLite
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| Posted: 31 July 2023 at 4:18pm | IP Logged
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aaronk wrote:
I've also have many CD-Rs in my collection that are no
longer readable. |
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I know others on this site have talked about their CD-Rs that no longer work. I
guess I've been more fortunate than most, but I've only had a few CDRs that
stopped working. I can probably count them on one hand. And I still listen to
my CDRs (i.e. the ones I recorded in the early '00s) and they still work. I don't
know if it's because of the brand or because I store them at regular room
temperature (though I imagine most of us do that), but I guess I consider
myself fortunate, for whatever the reason is.
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MMathews
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| Posted: 31 July 2023 at 10:14pm | IP Logged
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EdisonLite; me too. The ONLY CD-R's I've ever had go bad
were ones with a certain type of paper label. That was
about a dozen total. When I pull any archive CD-R from
the late 90s onward, they all still read just fine.
(Oh, and I did rescue a bunch from those paper labels by
removing the labels.)
As for commercial CDs, I have had only two go bad on me.
You could see they were manufactured poorly because the
silver inside started to disappear. Weird.
But that's it. I've had no issues with CD-Rs going bad
except for those mentioned above. I guess we've both been
lucky!
MM
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Hykker
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| Posted: 01 August 2023 at 4:36am | IP Logged
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Add me to the list of those who've had very few personally-made CD-Rs fail, and most if not all of those could be traced to a single PC with an
apparently bad drive.
That having been said, I've had quite a high failure rate of commercially issued CD-Rs (syndicated radio shows, etc.). For example I have
about 4 years worth of late 90s/early 00s Dr. Demento shows, about 75% of which no longer play properly if at all.
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aaronk
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| Posted: 01 August 2023 at 6:30am | IP Logged
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Hykker wrote:
I've had quite a high failure rate of commercially issued CD-Rs (syndicated radio shows, etc.). For example I have
about 4 years worth of late 90s/early 00s Dr. Demento shows, about 75% of which no longer play properly if at all. |
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This is exactly what I'm referring to. Whenever I bought CD-Rs, I typically purchased Taiyo Yuden brand discs, and all still play fine. I used to have some Maxell discs that stopped working, but I dumped those a long time ago.
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Aaron Kannowski
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crapfromthepast
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| Posted: 01 August 2023 at 6:58am | IP Logged
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Just about all of my CD-Rs still work fine as well. The only bad ones I encountered were bad at the time; they didn't work fine back then and fail many years later. (The bad ones were from a combination of a CompUSA house brand of blank disc and one particular disc writer that didn't like the CompUSA house brand.)
Back when I used to work for a particular disc manufacturer, we'd run lifetime tests routinely, and estimated the lifetime to be about 100 years. Store your burned CD-Rs in a cool, dry environment, and they'll outlast your CD-R writing/burning hardware, the usefulness of whatever's on the disc, and (probably) you!
Back in 1991, I did an informal lifetime test on a pressed Janet Jackson CD by running it through the dishwasher every week for a year. It survived just fine.
The only pressed discs that failed for me were three or four discs from the late-'80s. (Manufactured by PDO? I can't remember.) Everything else I countered, including 27+ years of the Top Hits USA weekly discs, still read just fine.
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LunarLaugh
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| Posted: 02 August 2023 at 4:28pm | IP Logged
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crapfromthepast wrote:
The only pressed discs that failed for me were three or four discs from the late-'80s.
(Manufactured by PDO? I can't remember.) Everything else I countered, including 27+ years of the
Top Hits USA weekly discs, still read just fine. |
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The earliest CDs from Disc Manufacturing Inc. are the ones that some of my disc readers get pretty
picky about. They aren't worn or rotting. The discs are perfectly clean and near mint, actually.
Rather it would appear that the formulation of the discs just wasn't quite right or there were too
many errors in their manufacturing process. Eventually, it seems they sorted this out as my later
pressed DIDX discs are pretty robust.
I do own a few discs made by PDO and WEA that are more prone to pinholes than others but they
still rip just fine.
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Paul Haney
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| Posted: 03 August 2023 at 12:33am | IP Logged
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Add me to the "lucky" list of those that rarely (if ever) had a CD-R go bad. I've burned literally thousands of them
over the years and still listen to many of them and I have yet to have discover even one that fails to play.
I've only had a couple of commercially pressed DVDs go bad and I have thousands of those too.
Edited by Paul Haney on 03 August 2023 at 12:35am
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whyaduck
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| Posted: 09 August 2023 at 4:31pm | IP Logged
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Many good points here have been made.
I've had many, probably dozens Memorex and Ritek DVD-r and DVD+R discs fail and a huge number within the first 18 months and all were stored properly/temp controlled. The burner was not the same for each bad as back then I had multiple in several PC's. This was all prior to mid 2003 when I learned to avoid those brands.
It's important to note the media contained file backups they were not Video format DVD's. CD/redbook format, DVD video format, Blu-ray video format burned media just like factory pressed has builtin in data redundancy unlike directory of your file system burned to CD or DVD or Blu-ray.
I was a huge Taiyo and Verbatim (NOT The life series) fan from around 2003-2015. I have had the dreaded CRC errors on 1 or 2 of each brand in that time but that was it.
After 2015 I moved everything to Disc drives and to "Cloud"
Thing about burned media is if the dye layer had a flaw you probably wont know until you try to pull data back at future point and are unable. In addition a burner can be near end of life and verify might show ok right after the burn, but it really did not burn the dye effectively for long term.
IMHO optical media has out lived its function. One of the least expensive things in tech is disc and price of even solid-state drives are dropping very fast -- finally. No more need for optical when 1TB Solid state or 2TB "standard" portable is ~$60. Just keep 2-3 backups via physical and or "Cloud" and welcome to the 21st century :)
Edited by whyaduck on 10 August 2023 at 11:43am
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Top 40 Music on Compact Disc : Chat Board
Topic: M-Disc Format, Another Gimmick?
