 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here. Came to my attention this morning that a number of days have elapsed without me talking on YouTube about my beloved M-Discs. So I figured I'd have to fix that situation. I'm just kidding, of course, but I do thoroughly believe in the M-Disc as an amazing technology, incredible form of archival storage. And if you're really thinking about investing in M-Disc, as I am thinking about for the next, you know, probably five or ten years from my video back up, you might have seen mentioned on Reddit or the other forums where people talk about this form of super geeky optical media that, well, M-Discs are more expensive than Blu-rays and they are more expensive, but I wanted to figure out exactly how much more expensive. So that's what today's video is going to be about. It's a cost comparison between the M-Disc and Blu-ray. So I'm just going to firstly grab some data. And I'm showing the workings just to show that everything is transparent on the recording date, which is you can see popped up on my calendar here, the 14th of June 22. That's when I'm recording this. So we're going to take as our benchmark for the price of M-Discs at the time of writing this product. It's slightly more expensive than the ones that it's slightly more expensive than the ones that you can print on for some reason. And it's $65 for a 25 pack of 25 gigs. So I'm just going to put this screen down here. This is all done manually in OBS. I'm going to make this big. This is where I'm going to be plucking in the figures here. So it's 25 M-Discs and 25 gigs per disc. So our total capacity equals A2 times B2, which is 625 gigs. That 625 gigs cost $64.99 USD. And we can get the price per gigabyte by dividing the price. So that's going to be equal to D2, the price over the capacity over C2. And that comes out to, and I'm just going to zoom in so all these numbers are a bit easier to see, this comes out to 10 cent per gigabyte, which sounds about right to me. You can reverse that if you want to just check that figure. 625 gigabytes, we said, multiplied by 0.103 rounding. And that comes to 64.375, which is very, very close. I didn't do the last three decimal places. So it's not exact, but it's, yeah, so that's correct. So it's 10 cents, 10.3 cents to be exact per gigabyte for M-Discs. And now let's go back to our Amazon page here and let's find a Blu-ray. So I'm just going to type in Blu-ray. And again, I'm not going to look for the cheapest ones. I'm going to go blank because I'm going to, it seems like I'm not getting the right thing here. So there's optical quantum. I'm going to do verbatim just to compare like was like. And these Blu-rays tend to come in bigger packs. So you can see this is a 50 pack. It's a 50 pack of 25 gigabytes. And it comes in at 40 bucks. So we can already see that it's going to be quite a bit cheaper. But let's see exactly how much cheaper. So we're going to be getting here 50 discs in the spindle. Actually, let's do the 25 spindle as our comparison. That brings the cost down to, wow, $19.22, $19.99. That's quite substantially discounted. But so is the 50 pack. So we'll go ahead with this price point. So we're getting 25 discs. The capacity per disc is 25. So that's going to be getting us 625 again. But the price here is $19.99. So our cost per gigabyte is going to be equals D3 over C3. And the figure we're going to get is 3 cents per gigabyte. So 10.3 cents per 10 points. I'm going to do two decimal places actually. So it's 10. This is U1, 10.3 cents per gigabyte for the M discs. And it is 3.2 cents per gigabyte for the blue rays. And we can actually calculate the exact number here or the exact difference by dividing equals E2 over E3. So it's 3.2511. It's three times more expensive. 3.25 times is the multiple or 325% the M disc. So over three times more expensive to purchase M discs for storing your data on versus storing versus just using regular blue rays. Now, in terms of working, as I'm going to show you a few workings, data pool and we're going to have here M disc blue ray and difference. So I'm just going to give you a few different scenarios depending how much data you're storing. So if you're storing 500 gigabytes of data, let's do one terabyte of data. That's going to be 1,000 gigs of course. And let's then take five terabytes or really, really big data pool. So if you're doing 500 gigs of data storing those on M disc. So that's going to be equals 500 multiplied by the price per gigabyte of M disc, which is 0.104 rounding. That's going to be $52. And for blue ray, it's going to be equals 500 times 0.032. And that's going to come in at $16. And the price difference is going to be equals 52 minus 16. So if you're storing 500 gigs of data, again, there might be a couple of rounding errors in these numbers. I'm pretty sure I did those. That math is correct, but it's not a huge difference. It's 36 gigs more expensive to store on M disc. And obviously, this is going to be this difference is going to get bigger as we continue the multiplication sum. So one terabyte, and I can actually be a little bit smarter here equals 1000 times may as well get the exact exact price per price per gigabyte. And that was for equals E two. So be 103. I'm just going to write myself a note. This is M disc. This is a blue ray. So 103 or $104 is rounding off here. We'll round off these figures to the nearest dollar for the M disc. And it's going to be 1000 times E three for the blue ray. That's going to come out to $32 rounding. And the difference here is going to be 104 minus 32. So if you're storing a terabyte data pool, it's a $72 difference, $72 more expensive to go for M discs. And let's now extend that to five terabytes. Well, we can just, it's pretty, we'll just multiply this to keep there just to keep things simple. So I have 360. So you can see as your data pool expands, the differential of M disc over blue rays going to expand as well. Well, I would contend that it's not really that big per terabyte. It's a $72 investment. If you're only storing 500 gigs, it's 32, $36. I'm sorry. I would contend that it's not really a huge difference if you have a, you know, consumer sized data pool, $72 extra per terabyte to get it on a, what should be a superior form of optical storage that will outlast regular blue rays, which are not designed for cold storage and archival. So personally, from my perspective, if you're investing in good data protection and good, good archiving, I don't think that that differential is unreasonable. I think it's worthwhile. I'm personally planning on using M discs over blue ray because I just don't think it's worth skimping on these figures, 36 and 72. But of course, everyone's situation is different. But those are what the numbers come out to. Anyway, hope these mathematics or sums were useful if you're in the market for archiving your data on optical media and you're not sure whether M discs or blue rays are the way to go. You've heard that M discs are more expensive. You're not sure how much just to reiterate the main data points here. M disc is judging by today's Amazon price price as a surrogate for the market price. M disc is about 3.25 or 325% more expensive than the regular blue rays. And those differences over in a data data pool of 500 gigs, it's going to work out to be a $36 difference, a terabyte 72 bucks. And if you're up to five terabytes, it's going to be 360. We may as well do the petabytes. So that's going to be 1000 times just for the sake of it. That's going to be seven just want to make sure I got all the zeros right there are 72,000 dollars if you're up to the petabyte scale. So I've never heard of anyone using optical media for storage on that kind of massive volume. But it just shows you how the differences are pretty manageable when you're in consumer land. But as you get as you start getting up to enterprise grade, storage is suddenly we go from a difference of, you know, 36 bucks if you're storing 500 gigs to a price difference of $72,000 almost as almost a six figure sum if you're storing at the petabyte level of scale. Thanks for watching guys, more videos coming soon. Have a great day.