Tag: Optical Media

Millenniata’s M-Disc Write Once DVD and Blu-Ray Optical Discs

In 2009, Millenniata began commercializing its M-Disc–a write-once version of DVD and Blu-Ray media that is designed to last for 1,000 years if stored properly. According to Millenniata’s website,

How is the M-Disc DVD different from normal recordable DVD Discs?

Other Recordable DVDs, including the most expensive “Gold” archival DVDs, burn data into an organic dye layer. Organic dyes start to degrade and fade as soon as they are written, leading to a condition sometimes called “data rot”. This problem is so severe that the National Archives warns that the reliable shelf life of a standard recordable DVD is somewhere between 2 and 5 years. The M-DISC™ contains no organic dyes. Instead, the M-DISC™’s data layer is composed of rock-like materials known to last for centuries. The M-DISC READY™ Drive etches the M-DISC™’s rock-like layer creating a permanent physical data record that is immune to data rot. The stability and longevity of the M-Disc DVD has been proven in rigorous tests conducted according to the ISO/IEC 10995 test standard for determining data lifetime of optical media.

That is partially marketing hype.

First, the claimed 2 to 5 year shelf life for regular recordable DVDs is absurd. Last year I successfully copied about 5,000 recordable DVDs that I had created spanning the early 2000s through about 2012. The only DVDs that I found were unreadable were ones that had been stored improperly.

Second, by “rock-like materials” it just means a layer of an inorganic carbon.

The nice thing about this, though, is that along with not having the potential shelf life issues of organic dyes, the M-Disc’s inorganic layer is apparently much more resistant to oxidation.

What really excited me when reading about these discs recently, however, is that they are now widely available in 100gb versions being sold by Verbatim. A 5-pack of the 100gb discs currently goes for about $68-$81 on Amazon, so these are not cheap. The non-M-Disc version of 100gb BD-Rs goes for about $60 for a 10 pack.

Why Is Blu-ray Writable Still So Expensive?

I really like to back up data to optical media, and as the volume of data I back up continues to increase, I would love to back up to 25gb Blu-ray discs rather than 4.2gb DVD discs. But Blu-ray media is still far more expensive than DVD media and the obvious question is “why?”

The Blu-ray Dimensions blog offers an answer which is basically — relax, DVD writable media was even more expensive at a similar point in its history.

The technology uses a different type of laser (that’s how optical discs are read). With all that it does not compare to when a DVD recorder drive was $13,000.  Yes those days (years) really did exist.  This is not where we break out into a story about walking to school in bare feet in the snow but it really is a matter of perspective.  Recordable Blu-ray is not as inexpensive as recordable DVD because DVD is a mature market.  Demand has leveled off  and despite the crazy forecasts from some manufacturing sectors, the same ones who dump product on the market because they are always wrong, prices have drifted down.

One problem with this analysis, however, is that Blu-ray does not seem to be approaching anywhere near the adoption cycle that DVD experienced. Sales of Blu-ray software and hardware have significantly trailed sales of DVD movies at similar points in the respective technologies’ histories. According to Wikipedia,

According to Adams Media Research, high-definition software sales were slower in the first two years than DVD software sales. 16.3 million DVD software units were sold in the first two years (1997-1998) compared to 8.3 million high-definition software units (2006-2007). One reason given for this difference was the smaller marketplace (26.5 million HDTVs in 2007 compared to 100 million SDTVs in 1998).

That slow adoption could make it much tougher for Blu-ray writable media prices to come down to DVD levels on a per-gigabyte basis.