M-Disc is a DVD made out of stone that lasts 1,000 years

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M-Disc is a DVD made out of stone that lasts 1,000 years
By Sebastian Anthony on August 10, 2011 at 10:15 am

The sickening click-crunch-whir of a dying hard drive. The ever-spinning-never-seeking DVD. The undetectable USB flash drive. The three telltale signs that a significant portion of your life is about to disappear into the digital ether. We’ve all been there. We’ve all wished that we’d made a second backup, or kept our optical discs out of the sun — but we haven’t, and the data is lost. So it goes.

But what if you had a backup medium that was nigh indestructible, almost immune to inclement conditions, and made of stone? You’d have the Millenniata M-Disc, which is basically a 4.7GB DVD with a data layer made out of stone-like metals and metalloids. The idea is that conventional, home-made optical discs have a very soft recording/data layer that isn’t very resistant to heat, humidity and light, while the M-Disc on the other hand has a much tougher data layer that can withstand the test of time. M-Discs can’t be burnt with your current DVD burner — melting stone requires a laser that’s five times stronger than normal! — but on the flip side, M-Discs are backwards compatible and can be read by normal DVD drives.

Now the actual statistics: according to Millenniata and the US Department of Defense, the M-Disc is incredibly resilient. 25 different discs, including the M-Disc, were exposed to 85C (185F) temperatures, 85% humidity, and bright, full-spectrum light for 24 hours. Where every other archival-quality recordable DVD failed the test with thousands of read errors and complete loss of data, the M-Disc passed with full data integrity and just a handful of errors. Millenniata even goes on to say that the stone layer of its DVDs should retain data for over 10,000 years — but the polycarbonate coating is only good for 1,000 years. Still, both figures are just slightly larger than the 5-10 year average lifespan of hard drives, recordable DVDs, and flash drives.

Storing data for 1,000 years is certainly a magnificent claim to fame, but does it stand up to real-world scrutiny? For a start, at around $7 per disk, the M-Disc is incredibly expensive for just 4.7GB of storage. Next, to use M-Discs as your primary backup medium, you would need vast amounts of space to store the discs: to back up just 10 terabytes (one Library of Congress) you would need 2,130 M-Discs, which would occupy about the same space as 10 hard drives — and it’s safe to assume that the US Department of Defense, or any other big institution, has petabytes rather than terabytes of data to back up.

Finally, if you want to read your archive of M-Discs in 1,000 years, you’ll need to find a DVD player. In a day and age where floppy disks were created and destroyed in 20 years, and optical discs are fast being ushered out of existence by portable form factors like the smartphone, tablet, and MacBook Air, do you really want to push all of your chips towards M-Disc? Rather than regularly copying backups from one medium to another to ensure integrity and contemporaneity — which is how it’s done today — are you sure that it’s wise to spend thousands of dollars on a storage medium that might be antiquated in just a few years?

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You can pre-order an LG Super-Multi Drive capable of burning M-Discs, or buy an M-Writer for $145 (and M-Discs for $6.50 from the same supplier).
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M-Disc is a DVD made out of stone that lasts 1,000 years | ExtremeTech
 
One other thing - civilization - how do we even know it will last 300 years? Will we even be around?
 
What about the software that stays compatible with the M-Disc for the new technology?

Many companies always eliminated old versions or even replace new entire operating system in every 5 years or so. i.e. OS 9.x, OS 10.x, etc.
 
webexplorer said:
What about the software that stays compatible with the M-Disc for the new technology?

Many companies always eliminated old versions or even replace new entire operating system in every 5 years or so. i.e. OS 9.x, OS 10.x, etc.
Click to expand...

Not just about software. It's design for photo, banks, etc.
 
Interesting. I wanted to try the M-discs since, well, I oftentime abuse some discs (Don't ask me... XP)... M-disc would be especially handy for the restore discs (like for Windows 7 clean reinstall) as M-disc is supposed to withstand even the brutal abuses (such as putting it in extremely hot water - a definite DVD killer) and even the user's stupidity.

Too bad I didn't have the balls to buy the M-disc drive (always suspicious of LG electronics' quality - just wished that Pioneer would release the M-disc compliant firmware for my 12x Blu-ray Disc burner so I could sacrifice a M-disc just for sh*ts and giggles - seeing how much that stuff could really survive even the drastic effects.)

M-disc is also available for us mortals so that's nice to have since we abuse them anyways. Newegg.com sells the LG BD burner which can burn the DVD M-disc: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136241&Tpk=m-disc

PS - they are working on the Blu-ray Disc version of M-disc, which is like ten times more tougher than the regular Blu-ray Discs.
 
*mind flutters to a future reality* (lol)

If you all will allow for a brief interlude of optimism here.....what if we use Kryptonite data crystals in the near future instead? :lol:

Impossibly massive bits of information could very well be encoded into these crystals using lasers and/or light pulses into minute sections within.

Wow, that would surely eviscerate our current technology and discard it with the rest of the Stone Age relics...!!!
 
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