M-Disc Format, Another Gimmick?

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.

aaronk wrote: I've also have many CD-Rs in my collection that are no longer readable.

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.

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.

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.

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