 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rothel here. I am currently spending a long night burning my M-discs to create an off-site video library to complement the on-site M-disc library and it is a very tedious process because M-discs burn very very slowly at about one time speed. I just had a comment exchange with a commenter on this YouTube channel and he said that it's a firmware thing. That makes total sense to me because it's a six times drive and it's four times discs but I'm not getting past. Let me see what I'm doing currently here. Where are we? We are at 1.5 times. That's about as quick as you can get. So what I want to do in this video is I'm just going to show for anyone interested in M-discs what the burners are currently on the market. Technically if you want to be really really pedantic it should be M-disc engraver because it's a different process than regular blu-ray burning which is kind of burning is probably the right word to describe how regular optical media like CDs and DVDs are burning which there is a dye and it's pitted to create optical contrast. M-disc is really like engraving it's kind of a rock light layer or inorganic layer and you make the bits and bytes are recorded as dense instead of you know firing away at a dye. But anyway that pedentry aside I went on to Amazon I put in a dummy US address some hotel in Manhattan just so that I could get my US options and just to give a quick overview of what is out there at the time I'm recording this which is June 2022 we are in June the 5th and I've called up 124 M-disc burners now you can guess so basically there's not really any such thing as an M-disc burner it's more a blu-ray burner that can also do M-discs or it's a DVD burner that can also do M-discs it's basically from what I understand and this I'm not even sure this stuff is really out there publicly for the M-disc it's just it's like requires a it has to have that capability it uses the same protocol so on the software level you're good any program on Windows or Linux that can burn to blu-ray or DVD should do M-disc it's just the actual writer that needs to have like a certain laser power I don't know but suffice to say not every blu-ray burner is M-disc capable likewise for DVD although I think really DVD is kind of irrelevant these days because if you're if you're using M-disc for backup and archival you're going to be you you're going to be using blu-ray just because you've got you can store much more per disc than DVD so I'm going to skip over the these kind of combo things like hey combo deals I like to buy my tech individually I don't like when they try to throw in oh look you get the burner we're going to give you an M-disc oh I just want to buy the I want to buy a piece by piece so here's number one option it is verbatim branded it's an external slimline blu-ray now the one I have currently requires two usb's and this guy does as well so that to me is a little bit annoying because the cable they give you is like this it like terminates in two usb ports the tail end my laptop for instance has two usb a ports but they're on opposite sides of the computer so I was trying to find as I'm going to buy a second disc I want to buy one that has ideally would have a different cable though you could probably I'm sure you could find uh a cable that is um your own cable that you know splits off earlier so this is verbatim branded I haven't seen one yet that is actually rated to work on linux but people generally do this guy's 120 bucks what I always do for amazon there's a few ways you can find out if stuff works on linux generally it does you can look on on reddit but I have good success usually just typing in Ubuntu and usually you can see this guy here everyone by the way he reports that it works on Ubuntu is doing a great service so I always go out of my way if I find something that works to write back because it's helped me so much so you can see there's two case reports this guy's using it on linux and k3b this guy's using it on Ubuntu 16 on his acer laptop and says no problems so I usually go I usually just order based on that if people say it works it usually it basically works verbatim is a good name I don't know if this is a white label product or whatever but um nice slimline thing I haven't looked yet into the potential complexity of getting one in my desktop I think it would be less useful for me and for many people because you can see these guys when they do mdisk they tend to have mdisk written on the actual uh disk cartridge as well as a blu-ray logo um I haven't looked into this from my perspective it's actually more useful to have an external one because it means I can burn the only only use I have for optical media these days is this mdisk archival stuff so as I don't as I never like you know need to read a cd or a dvd it actually makes more sense for me to be able to use it from different computers so external is more useful so here's another option this is a pioneer electronics um and it again if it says mdisk support just double check this guy's a little bit more expensive 173 books um but I'm thinking I'm thinking this guy might not require the two usb's uh potentially so this is another option from the pioneer company don't see a product photo oh this guy's usb type three usb type three slot loading for windows and mac so that would be really useful because so because this guy's usb type c um usb type three is more advanced obviously than usb a so you can deliver the two usb's on the previous on the other models are there because one delivers power one delivers data so if you have a usb three connection downside would be your computer would need usb three out plus side would be at that you you can just use one cable so this would actually be more useful for my laptop this is from pioneer again it's a bit more pricey because it's got a bit of a more modern connectivity let's see does anyone get it to work on a bunch of let's try linux no success on this one i'm gonna wrap this up pretty soon because i know this isn't the most fat so this is one that i bought personally um and i might just buy it again to be honest um i'm buying two so that i can simultaneously write my on-site and off-site copies because it's such a slow process it takes an hour each time so this would save me an hour for every time i write a disk to have two that i can use simultaneously um i think if i'm as i'm investing in this um disk process long-term i think it's probably going to be worth it so this is the lg it's six times it's called a wp-50 nb-40 this is what i have literally right next to me here it's 100 dollars so it's really really not bad in my opinion uh this is actually the bundle that give you an m disk with your purchase as well um and i can confirm that this works with um a bunch of linux because i'm currently using it on a bunch of and it's a nice product um it's pretty slim but it does require those two uh two connections and it's a little bit cheaper than 100 if you don't go for the option that throws in all these accessories here's the pioneer um i don't think there are just that many products on the market here's a cheaper one azus silver external now you have to be careful about these um about these speeds because like for example my m disks say they can burn up to four times and my drive says six times but on windows and linux i've never got more than 1.5 times so you have to be careful i think m disks just m disks are just really slow to engrave so even though this says it's eight times that might be referring to uh blu-ray or whatever else this can do again you're never going to get something that does just m disk as far as i can tell but when they do m disk as you can see they advertise m disk support thousand year storage solution save your precious precious memories or data for up to 1000 years um it seems to be very all over the place sometimes m disks say it's 100 years sometimes 1000 years as i said in my previous video given that most of us are going to be off this planet in 100 years time 100 years is good enough for me um so and then you have this so this is the this is what i actually paid yeah there we go to it when you buy it it comes up as this you purchase the thing so it was 90 bucks without the m disks just for the thing and it's a nice little you know external burner and it does blu-rays and dvds as well as m disks so you get the whole chibang and linux is not listed but um as i said i did search before buying this searched for a bun too i think and no that's strange i searched for linux then definitely got some kind of confirmation yeah this guy got it working with red hat um and this guy got it working with linux and i can confirm that it does work with linux so this is a nice machine from lg so for 90 bucks i've looked at i've looked at duplicators for m disks and they're just so much more expensive they're like four five hundred dollars so if you're going down the route of you want to do onsite offsite backup via m disk which is what i'm planning on for instance here we go here's a duplicator this is one to one and it just looks like super old school um it's from this pro duplicator plex um i forget their name plex something so like for three hundred dollars for this duplicator you're actually it's actually cheaper to buy two burners and find a software that can support uh simultaneously writing the same source to two targets like it's literally cheaper to buy two of those one hundred dollar burners than to spend three hundred dollars and this is a lot more bulky just to add to that so it's nice that these exist uh these duplicators but i i believe it's more cost effective to just buy multiple single burners i think that's it i won't i won't bore you guys any further with more options there probably are or more options but that's kind of just um a few of the ones in the market and yeah if you're looking to buy m disks the good thing is you know people think optical is dead um i'm recording this video on the fifth of june 2022 and yeah 128 results is probably not as many as you might find for regular blue rays but it's not like you can't find them they're definitely out there and um from to my surprise on the data hoarder subreddit there are actually folks using m disk for backup not in inconsiderable numbers so there is still a market for this stuff and yeah i think it's a very interesting backup option you uh don't use the cloud you keep physical control of all your backups your onsite and your offsite assuming you're off-siting on m disk and if you can get over the fact that it takes a bunch of time to burn an m disk if you just do this once per month which is what i currently do about 25 gigs of data per month set aside one hour and your entire month uh data is protected and then just post post or physically bring uh one of those disks to your offsite backup location and you've got a three two one backup uh compliance process no no storage cost you don't have to pay aws or b2 to store your data and best of all you own it you physically know where it is it's sitting in a cabinet and unlike storing on hard drive or other media like that you know that you're not going to get uh demagnetization over time so there's a lot going for this crazy m disk solution in my opinion and if you want to get started pick up a cobbler drives pick up a bunch of m disks and you can get going thanks guys for writing the video and a new video coming soon