 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. I'll show you one of the most random channels on YouTube for anyone who has stuck with me through the meandering topics up here. Thank you very much. I appreciate the continued viewing and subscribing and support of the channel. I wanna tackle today a topic that I personally find interesting because I'm really interested in data storage. And that's this technology called Mdisk. I've just gone ahead and ordered my first, I've ordered a Blu-ray reader writer that does Mdisk and I've ordered a stack of Mdisk. Now, Mdisk is really interesting. I've been looking for a while for a data storage medium that's suitable for long-term cold shelf storage. That means data that you can just leave on a shelf as opposed to having sitting in an NAS. Now, I take my backups very seriously and as a quite active YouTuber, I'm producing on a daily basis a decent amount of data. I've talked before about a lot of stuff related to backups and how for me personally, off-site isn't a Clyde backup, isn't really much of an option because of how bad my internet connection is. So I'm doing an off-site manually backup, putting the data in someone else's house. But in any event, whether you're just doing onsite or you're doing a proper three, two, one backup approach, which involves onsite and off-site probably makes sense that you want the both classes of data to be as stable as possible, right? So the problem with traditional storage media by traditional, I'm talking about what most people would think of when you said, hey, I wanna store a bunch of info. You'd say, I guess by a hard drive or by one of those plug-in hard drives, whatever. So that's actually, I've been using that. I've been dumping data off my NAS onto a hard drive enclosure and filling that up as I produce more video data from this YouTube channel. I don't just store the videos, I also store sometimes the original clips. Sometimes I store what's called a video bureau. So that's filling up, filling up, filling up as I produce more videos every day. And I've been dumping that onto a hard drive. Now, the problem with that approach is that hard drives are not good for long-term storage. They're not intended for that use case. Hard drives are supposed to be sitting in computers where the operating system hopefully has some kind of a system for detecting data degradation. Now, that's something called data rot or bit rot. And basically data, stuff like hard drives and even flash drives and soft drives, flash storage technology will over time degrade. That's due to depolarization, the way that the data stored involves magnetism and that magnetism will flip and eventually the data will become unreadable. So that's why you don't really want to use ideally hard drives for archival or shelf storage. So I mean posting on a subreddit, posting and lurking on a subreddit called data hoarder, which is basically where lunatics like me come to talk about their data retention problems. And I eventually, so I found some good threads and I eventually found one that suited my use case. Someone said the same thing, you know, I'm looking for a really good storage medium for just keeping my data on a shelf. What do you recommend I use? And someone said, well, probably M-discs. And I was like, what are M-discs? So M-discs are basically, they exist for Blu-ray and for DVD. And it's a really interesting story. It's this company, they've actually gone bankrupt, but now they've given their technology over to verbatim that's a really well-known, really big player in this data protection space and verbatim user technology. So what the technology is, optical media like CDs, DVDs, et cetera, Blu-rays are actually much less susceptible to bit rot than flash media. If you think about it, it has to be because you may, if you think about a CD, now people don't use CDs anymore, you listen to music streamed from Spotify or YouTube, but back when CDs were a thing, that data written on the CD and put into your CD player had to stick around for years because that was where the data was coming from, not from the internet. So these are actually ironically, even though they're today thought I was very old school, used still extensively in archive. Now the thing about M-discs and why an M-disc is different than a regular Blu-ray or DVD is the vulnerability of these optical media is that the layers that the disc is comprised of will actually degrade. Whereas for M-disc, they have used this, what they call a proprietary organic matter that they liken to writing data into a rock and apparently it's much more solid and stable. So that's really the only difference. So most you'll find the Blu-ray and DVD reader writers that will support M-disc. I think it just needs a different type of laser. Now my question was, okay, this sounds awesome. So firstly, I'm buying one of these things, absolutely. So I did, I ordered a Blu-ray writer reader that is capable of doing M-discs and hopefully will support Linux. And I ordered myself a spindle of blank M-discs so that I can begin transferring my NAS data, which is all this YouTube data, onto the M-discs. And that's gonna be my long-term storage. I'm gonna have a CD folder with all my M-discs in them, hopefully if this works. So my next question was, well, this is great. I'm super excited about this and I am. Expect videos on this topic coming soon. But how, just out of curiosity, does this stack up on a cost basis? Now I'm not asking this because I'm a cheapskate and I'm not a cheapskate, I think. I'm asking this because when you're thinking about data and long-term data preservation approaches, you wanna think about scale. You don't wanna think about just how much does this little first order cost. You're gonna think your video is gonna be growing and growing. How much over, when that expands from gigabytes to terabytes to even maybe petabytes of data, how much is that? As can you expect one to cost for instance the other? So I'm gonna try to answer that question in this video. So what I did, I prepared this little spreadsheet here on Google Sheets and I'm going to just put it together real quick here. Well, as quick as I can. I'm doing this live, this is unedited. So this is firstly what I bought today. This is verbatim's 25 spindle of 25 gigabytes. Now they make these also in 50 and 100 gig units and you can see a little picture, the 100 gig one here if I hover onto it. They're all written lifetime archival. So this is exactly the type of thing I've been looking for for years. I never knew these things existed until I read about them on Reddit. So it's 25, so what I'm going to do is I'm actually just gonna firstly enter this $64. I'll go back to my product here, the one I actually bought. So $64.97. So I'm just gonna plug that in. So my product here is an M disc and I'm gonna compare this to something much less exotic, just a terabyte hard drive from Newegg, right? So I'm just gonna see on a terabyte per USD basis, which how much more expensive M disc works out and I'm pretty sure it's gonna be more expensive. So this is actually verbatim M disc with a C and it's BDR technology, which is a readable blue blu-ray and it's 25 gigabit version and it's a spindle of 25, okay? I'm just gonna quickly drop in the link to, and this is gonna be an Amazon product. Now the capacity is gonna be, it's 25 spindle and 25 gigs each. So that's actually not terabytes, it's gigabytes. So let's do gigabytes here instead. So I bought myself 625 gigs by buying this 25 pack of 25 gig discs and let's also change this to USB for a gigabyte. The cost was $64.97. Now I'm not factoring in the ancillary costs and these actually just wanna say one quick more point about, one more quick point about M disc. Another reason why when I looked at other media that were commonly recommended on Reddit and elsewhere for archival, the big one being LTO, the problem with LTO is that you need to pay $3,000 for a drive. So there's a very high upfront capital cost and LTO only goes backward one generation. So this to me seemed like the perfect mixture, this M disc stuff. Well, it's about 100 bucks to buy yourself an M disc, excuse me, capable reader-writer. That's not super expensive. And so if this works, fantastic for $200, I can try it out, versus putting $3,000 just into an LTO drive that may be deprecated soon. So again, I'm getting 625 gigs for $64.97. So I'm gonna divide equals E2 over D2. So that's basically 10, rounding off here, that's basically 10 cent per gigabyte, okay? I hope I've done that right. Mathematics are not my strong point. I keep reiterating that, but it is unfortunately true. I'm good with words, I'm not amazing with numbers. I wouldn't say I'm enumerous, but I'm not as good with that with that. So let's go now and find ourselves a, I'll just put into Google here, new hard drives is sometimes easier to do like this than navigating through their huge website. I'm just gonna pop that open here. So I'm looking for desktop internal hard drives, and we're gonna get our hard drives. And I said I'm going to look for a terabyte, a terabyte, because that's just like a very standard. As I did a video yesterday, they go all the way these days up to 20 terabytes, which is pretty gigantic. So let's take what I want to use for Archive, but probably I'd want to use an archival class because they do exist these things. But for the purposes of simplicity, let's just, now let's do this right, Archive HDDI, I was searching for it last night, and we'll actually look at an eight gigabit one. So here we go, here's our guy. So that's 170, let's just do this one for a comparison. So this is C-Gate Archive, and it's a eight terabytes for $175. So going back into this spreadsheet, we're gonna be looking at the C-Gate Archive HDD, eight terabyte model from New Egg. Here is the link, if anyone wants this for download, I can send me an email, I'll send it to you, I'm just storing this on my own personal Google Drive for the moment. The capacity is eight terabytes, so that's 8,000 gigabytes. The cost is $174.99. And now if we divide E3, sorry, yeah, E3, oops, equals E3, three over D3, wow. Okay, so basically, in cents, I'm just gonna say in human, this guy is 10 cents per gigabyte, and this guy is 2 cents per gigabyte. Now that's rounding, it's 10 cents, and this is 0.21, but anyway, 2 cents per gigabyte versus 10 cents. So the answer from the analysis that I've done here is that it is indeed more expensive to store your data in Mdisk format, even comparing it to archival class, hard drive storage HDD, which is typically gonna be a little bit cheaper than hard drive storage intended for use in a computer because it's archival, they're gonna be giving you basically really, really low write speeds because it's what's called often worm data, write once, read many times. So the write is intended, they try to lower the cost by making it really slow to write and usually normal read speeds. So these are typically actually cheaper than regular hard drives because they're just optimizing the storage and degrading the performance. So even comparing to an archival class hard drive, we're finding those are actually five times cheaper than Mdisk. However, even though it's five times more expensive on the flip side to use Mdisk for your cold archival storage, you do have the benefit that if it actually is secure as a claim for 100 years slash a lifetime, well, I think most people would agree, it would be worth, if you waste money on it, if you spend however cheap the hard drive is, if it loses all your data, it's a disaster. So it's a complete false economy. So I think that, but it was still good to know what the difference is. Thank you guys for watching another one of my cost comparison videos for data and storage geeks. The TLDR of this video is that Mdisk's costs by five times more on a USD per gigabyte basis are costing 10 cents per gig. Whereas nowadays, given that storage has come down so far in cost for a archival HDD, it's actually only two cents USD per gig to store your data in one of those. Hence, it's quite a bit cheaper. Hope this video was useful. 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