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Comment by ahazred8ta | Hacker News Reader

Commercially available write-once M-DISCs are rated for almost 1000 years.

Allegedly the quad layer BDXLs should have the same longevity as they are made using the exact same technology. Shame Sony just announced they are going to shut down the only remaining factory in the world making those, I've ordered some from Japan but I imagine they will shoot up in price once the official stocks deplete.

Size of the Mdisc is 100GB be 128gb for Sony so honestly M discs aren’t that worse.

I remember our CD drive struggling to even read brand new PC Gamer demo CDs back in the late 90s. Whereas commercial game discs worked fine.

I remember everyone saying that CDs were rated for 100 years but disc rot seemed to kill that idea.

It is fascinating seeing in the retro games space just how quickly some are dying. The Gamecube/Ps2/Xbox era is starting to fall to it and I have even seen a handful of Xbox 360/Ps3 games with this issue. Many collectors now request photo's of the discs being back lit to check the integrity before purchasing.

And yet there are also a lot of audio CD's from the 80's that are holding on. A big part of it would be the manufacturing quality and how in the name of efficiency and lower prices, some corner may have been cut.

This was my rationale for switching over to vinyl around 2007. Its audio fidelity is worse but its failure state is more acceptable to me.

For anything digital, having reduntant backups and error correcting codes makes much more sense than worrying too much about the medium. The theoretical longevity of your vinyl won't matter if your house burns down or if you accidentally throw out the dusty box they are packed in.

That said, if you just like the sound of vinyl and feeling of handling them then good for you and I'm not trying to rain on your parade.

I already said that I don't particularly like the sound, and hard drives, CDs, and records alike can all be lost in a house fire. Of those three media, one fails less arbitrarily and catastrophically.

The lifetime of a medium is of no use for the general user if the lifetime of a drive is smaller and the industry stop making new compatible ones or historians in the future never have the budget and/or tools to custom build new drives.

They are significantly more expensive too.

Let me travel back in time and...

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