Comment by milcron
8 years ago
M-DISC is even better. Burnable discs use an organic dye which oxidizes over time. M-DISC uses a "glassy carbon" layer that is inert to oxidation.
They adhere to DVD-R, BD-R, and BD-XL standards so it's readable in standard disc drives. You need a special drive to burn them, however (requires a high-power laser).
> Burnable discs use an organic dye which oxidizes over time.
This is only true of DVDs and a rare variant of Blu-Ray called LTH. Even cheap shitty Blu-Rays from Chinese manufacturers use inorganic dyes these days.
Also, the French Archives did a test of a variety of DVDs for longevity in adverse conditions and found that M-DISC didn't last significantly longer than competitors, even those with inorganic dyes: https://documents.lne.fr/publications/guides-documents-techn...
The US DoD also did a similar test under different conditions and found it performed much better than the competition though: http://www.esystor.com/images/China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf
I suspect the difference between the French and US tests might be the French using a longer test duration and the Americans using light. The French went up to 1000h while the Americans only went to 24 as far as I can tell.
And unlike DVDs, I haven't seen any studies of longevity for M-DISC Blu-Rays.