M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.[5] The M-DISC DVD looks like a standard disc, except it is almost transparent with later DVD and BD-R M-Disks having standard and inkjet printable labels.
In 2022, the NIST Interagency Report NIST IR 8387[25] listed the M-Disc as an acceptable archival format rated for 100+ years, citing the aforementioned 2009 and 2012 tests by the US Department of Defense and French National Laboratory of Metrology and Testing as sources.
That being said, that’s 100GB a disc. You can stuff a lot more on a typical hard drive, and I appreciate that people want to easily and inexpensively reliably store very large amounts of data for the long term.
EDIT: At least in a quick search on Amazon, while there are plenty of drives rated for M-DISC, I don’t see any kind of “take hundreds of discs, feed them mechanically in and out of a drive” device that’d let one archive very large amounts of data automatically. You’d need 100 of those to fully archive a 10TB hard drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
That being said, that’s 100GB a disc. You can stuff a lot more on a typical hard drive, and I appreciate that people want to easily and inexpensively reliably store very large amounts of data for the long term.
EDIT: At least in a quick search on Amazon, while there are plenty of drives rated for M-DISC, I don’t see any kind of “take hundreds of discs, feed them mechanically in and out of a drive” device that’d let one archive very large amounts of data automatically. You’d need 100 of those to fully archive a 10TB hard drive.