The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Environmental_Leg471 on 2024-12-02 13:15:59.

Hello guys, this is my first post on this forum. I’m seeking 2024 hands-on accounts of working with M-Discs and such. If the personal-context stuff in curly brackets seems irrelevant, please skip it.

{I’m downsizing and attempting to reorganize my personal archive, which extends over 40 years of IT involvement and comprises many different formats. My objective is to transfer the contents of all my old media to easily-accessible long-term storage. I *may* add to the archive in the coming years but this is basically a one-shot exercise. I need a solution that I can deploy now that will enable access for the next few decades.}

After a lot of reading, some of it on this Reddit, I settled on the M-Disc format. This promises desktop recording and long-term integrity.

I bought a Verbatim 43888 drive, the one with Pioneer internals, which seems to offer reasonable performance and M-Disc compatibility at a reasonable price.

Having heard of problems with Verbatim M-Discs, I tried to source Ritek M-Discs from overseas. No luck, and the difficulty I had obtaining the other brand prompted me to go back to my research.

I turned up some letters which said that, while M-Disc DVDs offer particular advantages over the standard ones, M-Disc Blu-rays are not substantially different from their non-M-Disc counterparts.

I’m pretty happy with the Verbatim 43888, and I’d like to use Blu-ray rather than DVD. Should I try to source the Ritek Blu-ray M-Discs, or would I get multi-decade performance with standard BD-Rs? Any and all perspectives gratefully recd.