Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Archiving with M-Disc" video.

  1. Congrats on the 100K Christopher! Interesting, I had never heard of M discs and I do have a BD-R drive I bought a couple or more years ago... though I don't use it anymore. It's not M disc compatible, but I kinda wonder if you even need a special recorder for that... perhaps, if there is some power modulation needed. From my personal experience, newer types of raw optical media are pretty resilient... if you store them properly that is. None of them, probably not even that M disc, will survive scratches or major physical damages. Both CDs and DVDs in the past were kinda fragile... little heat and humidity could ruin then, and it was fairly easy for the layer bonding to come apart. I have plenty of original music CDs that were stored inside a cabinet, away from the sun, which all became corrupted - both data and physically too. The reflective layer just sort of rotted away, oxidated or came apart, leaving transparent channels. Pretty much unrecoverable. Could even be that the data layer was intact, but you'd still need some industrial level gear to take layers apart, apply a new reflective layer, and bond them all together again, so it's no use. Newer DVDs and Blu-ray discs are much harder to simply rot away. Better technologies for bonding layers properly, insulating discs and isolating important layers like the data and reflective layer came around. That is, as long as you are buying them from reputable brands... quite a lot of QA is needed to guarantee things. You can prolong the life of these discs quite a lot, specially if you can control room conditions... ISO 9660 puts humidity between 30 to 50%, and temperature between 18 to 23 C. But replacing the organic dye for an inorganic one is pretty smart. Data layer being organic was probably the most fragile component there. The three things I know of that can cause the most damage are: high humidity, temperature and UV rays. Temperature can be extremely bad if you have too much variation through the surface (say, the sun hitting just one side of the disc). And UV rays can not only damage data and reflective layer, but could also act on the protective layers themselves... as they are all plastic, UV can change composition and make it more opaque, which would make the data unreadable even if it was undamaged - which is why you should never leave CDs, DVDs or Blu-ray discs exposed to the sun from extended periods of time. Anyways, sorry for the long comment, hope some find the information useful. o/
    2