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Isn't the life span of a magnetic disc quite bad?

I've gone through over a half dozen Seagate 2.5 drives (spindle and hybrid) and one 3.5 external in the past five years, and I'm lucky if they last 2 years. This includes drives that are mostly offline.

I've switched to WD, but I haven't had them long enough to say that they're only better. The WD Green in my Time Capsule has lasted a few years though.

All these drive failures led me to buy a BD-R burner, which has worked out fairly well, although I would say it's better to buy burning software than using the free software (on Windows at least) if you want to avoid making a >= $3 coaster.

I find the 50GB capacity to be fairly easy to work with, since I'm much less likely to have to span files/folders across discs than the 25GB ones.

Look at mdisc - it should last a lifetime and longer.

Rewritable discs are bad, but write-once discs aren't. Especially if you keep them cool and dark.