Data storage technology continues to advance with every passing year, but some of the latest offerings may not be as good of a choice as they first seem. With that in mind, today’s SuperUser Q&A post discusses the pros and cons of M-Discs to help a curious reader make the best choice for storing his data.
Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
The Question
SuperUser reader munish wants to know if M-Discs are more reliable than other forms of storage:
Are M-Discs more reliable than other forms of storage?
The Answer
SuperUser contributor Dmitry Grigoryev has the answer for us:
Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.
I still have my CD-Rs that I recorded on 20 years ago, so the lifespan of regular CD-R discs is not five years like you said, unless perhaps you go for the cheapest ones. But if you have really found that discs which should last 100 years only last five years in your environment, I would reasonably expect that a 1,000 year lifespan disc should last about 50 years.
The real problem your descendants are likely to encounter in 100 years (let alone 1,000 years) is to find the equipment needed to read the old discs you have left behind. Typical CD and DVD drives are designed to last for five to ten years of normal usage and have perhaps 15 to 30 years of shelf life. It is hard to predict how many more years CDs and DVDs will remain in use, but they will disappear eventually, and then your descendents will have a hard time reading those discs no matter how much you have paid for them.
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