 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here today We are going on another intriguing deep dive into the fascinating world of the M disc the millennial disc and About its durability claims. So I've been making a few videos recently about M disc since it came to my attention and May seem a little bit weird to people. I will say this I've been dreaming for a very long time of finding something like the M disc I first got into backup about 10 years ago when I got into Linux and Started regularly destroying my distros through carelessness and the bug ability bug abilities at a word the buggy-ness of Linux and It always irked me that there wasn't like, you know in terms of the way the first ways I've knew to backup data the ways are probably most people know as you just get one of those You know a seagate a plug-in STDs they're in the market back then I think and you say fine, but then you read about stuff like bit rot and blah blah And you're like, oh the data is not really actually that safe at least long-term. So I Always wanted some kind of data archiving format that you could set and forget you could say Have my data it might be a pain in the ass to burn the data onto this thing But at least I know the data is good now And that's what to me the M disc is the closest thing on the market minus LTO And it's actually better than LTO for this apparently according to Curtis Preston Mr. Backup the restored all podcast he actually and he knows LTO inside and out and he says that LTO is susceptible to bit rot and M disc apparently isn't so There's people on reddit on the data hoarder subreddit who say there is so there I'm not the only crazy out there who cares about this stuff And there's M disc skepticism because M disc went millennial it went out of business and verbatim hold the tech and people say oh Is there is it a marketing scam? And maybe it's not that durable and is it really that different to blu-ray? So to those people I say firstly My personal take on the matter is I don't think it's a marketing scam like I interviewed the M disc guy Barry Lund Professor Barry Lund super-engaged computer scientists who really cares about storage and told the story of You know looking at petroglyphs on a hike and then as he was already a storage guy He was like oh, that's a great way to write data. Why are we burning data in terms of pitting with the laser optical contrast? let so The the tech is a trade secret because people have to make money from their inventions That's how innovation works. So I don't think there's any reason to be skeptical They've open sourced as much about the project as they can they've said okay This is what's different than a blu-ray. It's a it's an inorganic layer and There is do detesting online, which we're going to take a quick look at now So for people who doubt like sometimes people can be too doubtful and too critical especially on reddit And I say look yeah optical storage. It's not you know ideal because of its capacity constraints But this is a pretty like I'm I don't have shares in M disc I don't think one can have shares because the company's bankrupt But this just strikes me as a long-term data fan is a very very good product and rather than trying to pick holes in its claims I My hunch is you know if you're into data protection and people will crib about the price of the discs It's three dollars for an M disc and it's one dollar for a blu-ray. Look if you're investing in protecting your data, right? to a two dollar per Disc Difference should not be a make or break factor. We're not talking about enterprise level storage We're buying up tens of thousands and that two dollars is going to become twenty thousand dollars if you're a personal Computer user like me. You're a photographer videographer and this is actually valuable with the 100 gig disc, right? Somewhat viable you might need to burn a disc every week, but that's not the end of the world You put them in their optical case, so I Think for me when I'm looking for and are Caring about preserving my data during my lifetime, which sounds super morbid But that's actually where the end this guy is coming from that's that's my interest by the way and he shares that interest I don't I like the cloud is great But I want to have my own data sitting in my house that I can hand over to the next generation and this are rated to last 100 years some for a thousand years, but 100 is probably good enough and Let's face it. That's enough for handing it to the next generation for most people given the average human lifespan in developed countries these days, so You know to me, it's an amazing product Anyway, let me now go ahead and show you guys So that's firstly the composite layer is out there on the internet that now in Wikipedia I encourage anyone to dig through the Wikipedia. I'm a little bit I was gonna sit under the weather, but what why should I be euphemistic? I'm a little hungover today but I'm gonna do my best to just at least start people start to show what's out there. Okay, so there's a Wikipedia page and Then there's a section called your ability claims according to millennia to the US Naval Air Warfare Weapons Division. I've no idea why I don't know anything about this body I'm gonna just try to get myself in a better better frame here The US Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division of the DOD the US Department of Defense Found that M discs are much more durable than conventional DVDs The discs were subject to the following test conditions in the environmental chamber. So that's the thing right about M discs They say they're gonna last 100 years, but they were invented when 2005 or something like that So this is all and then people in red it will say, oh, but how can you know it really last 100 years with 2005 and until someone burns an M disc in 2005 and takes it out in 2000 and What to 2105 we can prove it. Yeah, of course. So as a surrogate for that testing They're doing these accelerated aging tests to try simulate aging That's the best we can do because none of us have no one to the best of my knowledge has yet invented Time travel as a thing. Okay, so the DOD took a look at it Which by the way is in my mind a voter confidence if the US government is taking this seriously enough to consider this as a Valuable media for long-term storage of presumably Some kind of sensitive information, right? I'm not gonna tell you what they were looking at But I doubt they would be doing this for the further to satisfy debate on reddit The disc were subject to the following test conditions in the environmental chamber 85 degrees Celsius 85% relative humidity Conditions specified an ECMA 379 that you can really really go down in a nice little rabbit hole for yourself here And let's take a little check down that rabbit hole as we're as we're going along here ECMA 379 What the hell is this this ECMA standard specifies an accelerated aging test method test methods Like it's fascinating that this stuff actually exists, right test method for estimation of the archival lifetime of optical media as Defined by ECMA international who I have no idea what the what ECMA international is I don't know some standard setting committee So basically if you really want to download the standard, let's download the standard and take a look at the standards ECMA test message 40 page document for the estimation of the archival lifetime of optical media And they tell you so this stuff is standardized and you can go through it and Go through it and go through it and maybe lull yourself to sleep as you go through it But that's out there so if you really really I'm I unfortunately do not have the mental brain power right now Or I'm not sure ever to go through this the details of the standards and I actually do find it really hard to read Long PDFs on my computer if I'm really interested in a PDF, I will always print it out. I'm sorry. It's bad for the environment So I might actually print this and take a better look at it But that's out there anyway the ECMA standard for anyone, you know really really So that's that let's go back a few tabs. Ah, yes the M disc According to so the DOD looked at it and then also the French National Laboratory of Metrology and testing so that's presumably some kind of equipment body They did 90 degrees so slightly higher than the DOD and also 85% humidity The DVDs ours with the inorganic recording layer like M disc were still readable after 250 hours However with an error rate of both thresholds Controversial and we're rated less than 250 hours equivalent competing offers the performance was better than several DVD brands using organic dies That's not surprising. That's the whole thing about these where discs were not always readable after 250 hours Slightly lower than another brand which achieved a lower read error was rated So I'll have to find out what that was much less than glass DVD technology Silax Which was rated more than 1000 hours. So I've tried my best to learn about Silax that Wikipedia is it's a deadlink. There's nothing there I Don't know it sounds like the next level M disc like a really really crazy But I don't think this is commercially available this Silax glass master this it sounds to me like something that Hollywood has been using to burn Masters of movies or presumably where you know, you don't care how much this thing's gonna cost You just need the best thing possible There's some discussions on this mice website about it. You can follow it yourself But it's the best my knowledge Silax isn't on the market like you can't go and say hey I want to buy a Silax drive and a Silax disc, please so in the Footnotes we will find some interesting information We'll find the patent on Google patents For the and its inventor Barry Lunt and Matthew Linford of bring them young Barry is who I spoke to last week And you can download the patent. It's open source PDF. See nothing is hidden here So again, the people on Reddit say, oh, we don't know what's in the M disc. It's a secret If you're really really smart and know about data and data storage, I presume this stuff will not be double-dutch to you You can see Sort of the details of it again. I'm not at that level. I'm just a sort of tech fanatic, but if you really really Know this stuff storage media you can read the patents as well and find out everything about About what's actually there so then there's also a 75 page breakdown of the do these findings There was a two-page summary that unfortunately is dead It was it's supposed to be on the M disc website, but it's not going I'm gonna just turn off the air conditioning because it's a bit too cold Maybe I'm for I've frozen myself with these this M disc discussion And then there is a 5.4 is summary of the test. Oh, this is a friend to the friend stuff You can't see I you can't see the URLs populating in the bottom of my tab here So we don't have the two-page at our disposal, but we do have the 75 page DOD research and we have the two Do we have the French research? so the French research is Here it's a 12 page PDF so slight slightly less intimidating durability of recordable DVD plus minus R and DVD made of glass silks that elevated temperatures and humidity and We have results of the experiments on accelerated aging on page seven Like any kind of you know Scientific paper it's gonna tell you firstly the methodology Then the results then the conclusions and we have here inorganic DVD are which to me sounds very much like M disc So for so this is all really interesting stuff like whoever you know is doing this really really went sort of all out on the So they used references of DVD and DVD are verbatim Product for was verbatim archival grade. So I don't think these are end discs. I think verbatim also have a separate range for archival grade and it's this is the disc So that was disc for and then they had this crazy silks technology, which I can't seem to find anywhere in existence the two models of disc studied and disc and Data treasure disc are made of recording layer made of either metal metal oxide and metal ceramic. Here is the M disc And like look at this look at this. This is nuts This is the stuff. They were literally doing they were like loading up these discs of different types of discs in this accelerated aging chamber and Proving them. This is like a real scientific study here so And again, I presume government agencies who are looking at this stuff So carefully are doing so because they're thinking about archiving some really important data on this M disc and This is where that Wikipedia is referencing from after 250 hours in the climatic change chamber The M disc exceeds the error rate threshold as specified in P1 8 the average P1 8 is 870 and the jitter is 11.8 The discs are unreadable after 500 hours The measured lifetime of the DVD are M disc DVD are M disc They weren't losing. They weren't using blue rays is less than 250 and we can see here just the kind of results plotted Out here, I need to put myself a little bit smaller that we saw The this Silks crazy silks technology Blowing itself out of the water with the thousandth hours and we saw where is the M disc here? We go a millennia to M disc Coming in at less than 250 hours But the northern star data DVD plus our data treasure disc did make it to 250 likewise this did and these products also Fell short of 250 in the accelerated aging chamber. Then again, is this relevant 85 degrees humidity? What if you're storing your stuff in? Proper conditions so P1 ace is priority inner inner some ace Let's see anything else interesting, so I think that was kind of the conclusion of that so that was the That was the French report and this is the US report the US reports longer at 75 page document Accelerated life cycle comparison of millennia to archival DVD prepared by Ivan sieve So silver kek at the life site life cycle environmental engineering branch of the naval air warfare center weapons division final report format millennia to Approved for public release distribution and limited And this is more bullish as you can see none of the millennia to media suffered any Any data degradation at all every other brand tested showed large increases in data errors after the stress period Did it say it was sponsored by final report for millennia? People around it will say, oh, maybe there's a conflict of interest This will detail the test Preparation and execution and results and conclusions and figures and tables 75 pages cut to the chase guys. What happened? Super super super long detail more crazy photos of testing out optical media in the Accelerated agent chamber What are they even using? What are these? They're like they're putting it on like a metal clamp I'm with some kind of like this locking mechanism there. I don't know incredible. It's called a disc exposure rack I wonder if you buy one of these things Excuse me as I drifted sleep lamp array detail Disc location adjustment detail chamber view it's 75 pages stay with me for another few minutes. We're almost we're almost here. We're almost here La la la should I sing as I go through this Document would that make this video more interesting if I begin singing La la la M discs M discs. Okay interesting So look you can even actually see the delkin disc They actually photos before and after photos the many after before and after photos. These guys are clever They're very clever. They wrote on the permanent marker on the inside of the disc So this is actually the pro method I've talked about this in a permanent marker video That one should not write one should not ideally you should use CD grade permanent markers And if you're going to write anywhere you want to write on this part of the disc where there's no data stored so I'm surprising that these Optical media boffins were were on were on the case and the before and after accelerated aim were looked Indiscernible no difference. No physically physically observable difference Did the Mitsubishi the greatest difference was visible on the Mitsubishi discs? Every disc exhibited obvious light and dark rings in an alternating pattern was the greatest fading on the inside radius Before is here in the Mitsubishi disc and after is here. Yeah, I can see that concentric circles Yeah, definitely. I can see I can see I feel them. I see where they're coming from more bar more Bar charts more bar charts again, and you can anyone can print this stuff out. I Think we've kind of got to the end of this. Where is a conclusion? Where's a conclusion? Do they miss it somewhere? I don't know, but they look all the data is here the PI E8 the standard stuff la la I need to like just use the actual cursor here for this because this is very inefficient So that's the end of it. So somewhere in here if you're really interested you can probably find out like details about the methodology I mean you can find out all the details are here about the methodology and whatnot I think that's enough for me for today. So that is that's it I don't think I succeeded really here in getting to the bottom of it I'm just trying to pave the way for smarter people than I to really dig through this data Because for sure on the subreddit there are much smarter people than I or much more knowledgeable people than I about optical storage and You can go through these PDFs. They're all there from the from the wiki and If you figured out more or have more thoughts or figured out where the hell one can get the silak stuff Because I'm very interested. Please report back to me in the comments. Thank you guys for watching