Verbatim no longer sells real M Discs, now puts regular BD-Rs in MDisc packaging | Hacker News Reader

Verbatim no longer sells real M Discs, now puts regular BD-Rs in MDisc packaging

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34 pointsValentineC10 comments

I didn't know what an M Disc was and had to look it up. It's archival-grade DVD/Blu-ray tech that's claimed to last 1000 years if properly stored.

(Thought I'd save some of you a google search.)

I do wonder whether it's even possible to substantiate longevity claims of this sort, or whether it's purely an exercise in "here's a number that would look impressive on our sales materials".

I could believe that they know exactly what materials the disks are made from and they know how stable they are and that the materials don’t react with each other. “Stored properly “ could mean in a light proof, EM proof, temperature controlled, vacuum sealed container

> I could believe that they know exactly what materials the disks are made from and they know how stable they are and that the materials don’t react with each other.

Without tests, i find it very hard to believe. Even testing cannot always predict real live behaviour.

I would expect them to run HALT testing in order to build confidence in the 1000 year lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_accelerated_life_test

BD-R discs using inorganic dyes are durable enough that the M-Disc branding is likely moot. The OP suggests that these newer Verbatim discs might be using far less durable organic dye, but that's not exactly clear.

(Other users even claim that organic-dye-based BD-R are quite uncommon, limited to 25GB capacity and generally not something that could be mistaken for a "normal", higher quality BD-R.)

The top comment is,

> That's insane, they are betting on "no one will notice" and when people's fake m-discs fall apart in 10-20 years their money will be long gone.

For those who know more than me, is this accurate? Will the replacement disks indeed be less durable? M-discs are apparently supposed to last a thousand years - the suggestion of replacing with a lower quality, cheaper one which will cause problems in future is unpleasantly plausible in our cost-cutting world.

I'm reminded of Western Digital quietly changing their backup-quality Red drives in 2020 [1], which was similarly a replacement of underlying technology under the same brand and purpose.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...

> M-discs are apparently supposed to last a thousand years

Only true for the DVD flavor. BD doesn't have that guarantee, AFAIK no durability guarantees at all.

SMR drives aren't lower quality or cheaper, though, and are used in production storage arrays. A NAS is also "not a backup".

The panic was mostly driven by people removing the hard drives from WD EasyStores to take advantage of the significantly lower cost per TB for repurposed Red and White label HDDs and a loophole regarding the warranty. This happened at the height of the Chia boom when decom disk shelves went from being e-waste to costing MSRP and the supply of large format storage dried up. Many people learned that year that a hard drive is not just a hard drive.

WD did change the <6TB WD Red NAS drives to SMR, but SMR drives aren't less reliable or unsuitable for use in prosumer NAS products. CMR and SMR shouldn't be mixed, but they weren't shipping mixed batches.

When I researched M Discs a few years ago, people were saying there was no real difference between regular Blu-ray recordable discs and the M Disc version (unlike DVDs, where M Disc is actually physically different than a DVD-R).

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