 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here day two of my of my head cold So I sounded a bit husky, but I hope you guys can still hear me and understand me I want to do a video today about a what I think is a pretty fascinating technology. They came across this week called the M disc I know why I said like that the M disc I came across this on the data hoarder subreddit and that is like if you share my wacky interest in backup and Data management, I know it's not the most glamorous subject, but it is super important Especially if you're someone who creates a lot of data So whether you're a photographer or a videographer and I doing a lot of work in video You're creating lots of data and on a daily basis like right now I'm creating probably two gigs of video a day, right? And you want some way to keep that data safe, so People watching this video probably know the fundamental backup rule three two one you on one copy in the cloud But for onsite, I've been looking for a while for some kind of an archival Data format suitable for cold storage, right? So what I'm doing currently or like most people I have like most data hoarders I have an NES on my network and that's gonna want to use day to day But I'm also dumping it onto these hard drives for cold storage and now I did experiment was keeping one in a car for a month Wacky experiments to see if the data would be fine, and it was like Fine, but I wouldn't so you can see here. I wrote on the NAS off-site backup so I create various types of data and the good stuff I'm putting up to the cloud etc, but There's a lot of stuff like I put this video in this category that I'm not super worried about it Like I'm happy that it's on YouTube. I trust, you know My YouTube account is not gonna get deleted or whatever disaster could compromise that data but equally Equally, I want to have something decent copy of it. So I'm like, okay with sacrificing Not doing an off-site backup for this kind of data. I know that's backup heresy, but anyway, so I've been looking for a while I haven't I do have an NES on my network, but I've been looking for something suitable for Archival cold storage specifically and now the problem with hard drives for cold storage and my cold storage We were talking about just leaving something on a shelf not connected to electronics The problem with hard drives and flash media generally is that as far as I understand they store their data through magnetization the the reader arm moves over the platters in the hard drive and Like put some magnetic charge and that's how it actually writes data obviously on a micro micro micro level But if you just leave a cold hard drives are really intended for Living in computers where they're you know fired up Regularly and the computer ideally also the operating system Warns you of errors pretty much every operating system does that these days and so you can know Okay, the hard drives failing need to get a new one or need to back up now. So I Was looking for ages for like an optical Sorry for like in storage media. I came across a few things on the data hoarder subreddit I know this is like a weird video because there's not really much going on. I'm just speaking. I am gonna show a few things so Bear with me just for a few moments longer When it comes to cool data storage LTO is commonly recommended the problem with LTO tape basically is that The drives are really expensive. They're like 3000 bucks and Prodically LTO gets updated and apparently apparently according to the reddit people according to what I've read elsewhere They're actually also Susceptible to bit rot or data on so that's our enemy for cold storage. So apparently the very best thing for Archival cold storage is this thing called the M disc and the M disc is essentially a Modified version of the DVD as in the good old DVD and the blu-ray so Now I'm just gonna share some info I found about it from the internet And I have ordered my M disc burner and my M discs I'm gonna do some planning doing some pretty wild videos wild by the standards of data geeks Putting M discs on the roof and stuff like that But here's just a little bit of tidbits about what on earth this stuff is so it's called M disc because it was developed by a company called Millenniata, but the catch is that well. It's not really catch the company's gone bankrupt So many other when but so this doesn't sound like the most auspicious story, but hang on and gets better So many Millenniata went bankrupt in 2016, but They are still Inexistence and the reason that is is that their technology is proprietary But it seems like they gave it over to their licensing into verbatim, which is very much an active data company. So What it is? So I said it's a it's a it's a kind of souped up DVD blue-dry or sorry Blue day blu-ray disc recordable BDR, right? But so you do have to if you want to work with this stuff You do need to you do need to buy a blu-ray. So I don't really understand why you'd want to use DVD given that Blu-rays can hold more and whatever. So I guess most people these days are probably using it for blu-ray So you want to get a blu-ray? If you want to burn them, you're gonna need a blu-ray writer that can do M disc says it's M disc compatible I think you can read them. It says M discs are readable by most regular disc drives So I think the process of reading them is quite easy It's the it's the writing that you need a special thing for because you're engraving into the special layer And that's how optical media works. It's just engraving bits and bytes. So this is actually the best cold storage So the company did go bankrupt as I said, it's not not the most auspicious stars Now what is the M disc? Well the exact properties of M disc and we're meeting just the Wikipedia here as you guys can see While the exact properties of M disc are a trade secret the patents protecting the M disc technology Assert that the the data layer is a glassy carbon glassy carbon or glass like carbon and that the material is substantially in earth to oxidize Oxidation and there's a melting point of 200 to 1000 degrees Celsius So I'm totally gonna put these heaties somehow as part of my my wacky testing So people I've heard I have read some skepticism on reddit people saying I don't know if they're really that much better than blue rays I tend to believe they are like it sounds like they've gone to a lot of effort and it does make sense that if they've gone into the You know gone through the effort of developing this R&D that they'd want to paint in this So none of this really sounds so suspicious to me, but they did testing So the US Naval Air I told you this would get more interesting According if you stuck with it according to many at a the US Naval Air Warfare Center So this is pretty crazy and the D and the DoD so like the US government is like Oh, this actually sounds pretty cool So you think about it tons of people need this stuff like governments and especially with compliance being such a big thing nowadays with GDPR What not? Retaining data is like super important and the cloud isn't always so viable. So this is like the old cloud But I they're not they're not mutually exclusive. You could back up on to M. Disks and then do your off-site to something like AWS So according to Melania to the US Naval Air Warfare Center of the DoD Found that M. Disks are much more durable than conventional DVDs. The discs were subject to the following task conditions So they put it up to 85 degrees and they did some kind of accelerated Humidity testing also the French National Lab of meteorology and testing. I don't know who these people are but it's fascinating So they've also been like playing around with them So this sounds less encouraging the performance was better than several DVD brands using organic dies where discs were not always readable after 250 hours so Much less than glass DVD technology Silax which was rated so this is another like fascinating thing. I only heard about this read this this thing called Silax I have no idea if it still exists Fascinated by it the French the French people said that this was like the best thing Silax and apparently it's like a glass DVD I tried to research it. I couldn't find I couldn't find it in production, but it did sound like Hollywood uses this to like burn the masters. So I don't know I Regard all this stuff is pretty interesting personally So that's pretty much it if commercial support as I said blah blah blah So ASUS LG Pioneer verbatim make the drives nowadays And right so there's another company doing the The actual media and verbatim do it now what a couple more things that I wanted to show you guys So this is a schematic from M disc itself their website which is still up Showing what they say the difference between an M disc and a regular DVD is right so regular DVD It says here standard DVD is polycarbonate layer The data is these bits and these these bumps basically Reflective layer adhesive layer dye layer and that seems to be to me where the problem occurs and a corruptible layer That's vulnerable to failure now From what I read these are right once discs. So you just burn it once I'll probably figure all this stuff out when I actually get my hands on these guys. So they call this a sense super impressive I mean, and if you think about it rock is like the king of cold data Right you go to a historical site and stuff is are etched into rock and it's still there So that's the awesome a cold data storage. You think about it So they call this a rock-like layer, but that's the trade secret So we don't know what exactly the rock-like layer is but it's there and then you've got the flashy polycarbonate layer One just one more thing. This doesn't really add so much to it But here's another and they brand themselves as the world's first permanent backup discs But lasts forever. That's a very bold claim Now I plan on doing all sorts of wacky fun with my M disc like putting them in I'm gonna bury these things in like a park You know like record a little YouTube video for the future as a joke. I'm buried So I'm gonna do wacky M disc experiments guys coming up on this YouTube channel But this is another thing. It's pretty much the same Okay, final thing I want to show you guys is so where would you Where would you buy these things is to show you it's actually not so hard to find You can see what I've been searching for recently. I want to get a depression awareness t-shirt. I did see that they came up It's important to me M disc writer or burner. I Think this is the one I've ordered so you can see like verbatim make them So you just have to see that they're M disc compatible right as I mentioned don't just buy any regular Blu-ray or DVD burner if you're using DVDs make sure you see this M disc support So I wasn't it really wasn't hard to find these And what else did I say? Oh, yeah M disc I'll just do M disc and Let's see. Okay. Here we go. So a 50 just to show you guys the pricing how much these things cost You can see I've just purchased these They come in spindles from they come in like one packs five packs and spindles of 25 and They come in individual disc size up to 100 gigs, right? So if I got a 25 pack of 100 gigs that would be getting me 2,500 gigs or 2.5 terabytes of data For 256 bucks now compared to hard drives. Yeah, the more expensive I did the mats earlier this week It's like specifically actually five times more expensive than HDD, but if it actually lasts forever Or as they claim it's good value I just want to show you guys a few more products. These are pretty much the same Price as far as I can see it's and they make them in inkjet printable versions, too So, yeah, I never heard about these before I came across this thread on data hoarder So I'm super excited lots of M disc adventures coming up on this YouTube channel. So stay tuned for those and Thank you guys for watching another video