M DISC BD-R 25GB 4X with Branded Surface - 25pk Spindle

I bought Verbatim M-disc for the first time to back up my extracted movie Blu-ray ISO. I was worried that it would fail when burning the disc after reading reviews online, but with the right software and a good burner, this disc is very reliable. I bought 25 spindles of 25GB SL discs, and 25 out of 25 discs were burned normally without any errors! Wow! The quality of Verbatim BD-R is undoubtedly good... but the price of M-disc Blu-ray seems a bit too expensive IMO. In the old days of DVD, organic dyes were used, so M-Disc had the advantage of using inorganic dyes to enhance the durability of preservation, but most Blu-ray discs, except for LTH discs, are manufactured using the HTL method that uses inorganic dyes same as M-Disc. Unlike DVD, the M-Disc BD-R discs doesn't require any specific burner and fully compatible with normal bluray recorder. Base on these facts, I don't think the difference between the M-Disc bluray and "normal" HTL bluray discs is big in terms of durability. The price of 25 M-Discs BD 25GB is $65. On the other hand, the price of 25 25GB HTL "Inorganic Dye" BDs manufactured by the same company is $23, while Amazon Japan sells 50 discs for the same price! If there is not much difference between M-Disc and regular HTL, there is no reason for Verbatim to maintain the production line for this disc after Millineta, the creator of this format, went bankrupt, but even considering that, I think the price difference between the two is too much. Of course, I think the quality of the Verbatim discs themselves has been proven this time, so I plan to buy Verbatim Blu-rays again next time (in fact, as of the time of writing this review, the Verbatim discs I ordered from Amazon Japan are already on their way!) Maybe in a few years, I will write a second review of M-Disc and advise you not to repeat the same "mistake" I made just now. Who knows? Only time will tell. For those who want detailed information... The software I used to burn my disc is ImgBurn and I burnt all my discs with 4x speed. All the discs I burnt are verified after the writing is finished. The disc burner I used is LG WH16NS40 with external enclosure (Vantec NST-536S3-BK) I also attach photos of the discs before and after recording.

I closely followed the invention and introduction of M-Discs, because, perhaps foolishly, I wanted my family pictures and videos to last forever. Or at least a long time. Archiving anything digital now days is a huge problem. You have a bunch of choices, not all of them good. It's not like the old days where black and white photos from grandpa's photo albums or Kodachrome movies stuck into a closet could be pulled out 50 years later, and there's a good chance you'll still have an image. If you put your digital media on a hard drive and stick it on a shelf, the drive could easily seize up if you pull it out 10 years later. Flash drives are just as bad. You may not have anything after 10 years. The cloud? Now somebody has to pay the bills. What happens when environmentalists figure out all those data farms are a huge source of CO2? Or your grandchildren decide not to pay the Cloud monthly payments? Your digital memories are toast. So along comes M-Discs, which have a completely different formulation than standard organic dye blanks. The Navy allegedly compared M-discs to ordinary blanks by putting them out in the sun and rain. Data on M-discs survived a month of abuse. The other discs? The data was gone. Great. You can stick M-discs on a shelf and they'll be fine in 50 years because they say they last 1000 years. But wait! Will anybody have the players functioning? Look how fast storage technology is changing. Can you get grandpa's 8mm movie projector to work? Does your car still have an 8-track tape player? That's the problem. And to add to the confusion, supposedly some French Technology agency did another test of M-discs vs. "ordinary" archival blanks, and found they were all about the same, and that a little abuse made the data vanish. A completely different outcome from the earlier Navy tests. All these presents a real dilemma. I've rolled the dice and still use M-discs. I put warnings all over the labels I make to keep the discs out of the sun and hot attics, and to occasionally review technology options in case media needs to be transferred to new "better" storage mediums. You really just have to trust that somebody down the road cares about the past, and if they don't the good thing is YOU won't be around to care either. For medium term storage M-discs are great. You have your data, your privacy, and some level of extra durability. The NSA and the North Koreans aren't culling through your digits in the cloud, and thinking about erasing them. However, remember. Your house can burn down. Make an extra disk and store it elsewhere. Preferably out of a flood, fire and earthquake zone. They cost quite a bit more than ordinary blank discs, but I've never had one fade out like the ordinary organic disks have faded. And I also back things up on hard drives just in case. Multi-site and multi technology storage is about all you can do to keep your stuff for a while.

The best long-term archival quality storage media on the market (as far as I currently know). I've been happily backing up my precious files to these things for years. Warning: M_DISC compatible Blu-ray drives are required for burning data to those discs.

I've purchased a few batches of M Discs over the years. There is something blatantly different about the latest stack I bought December 2023 and it turns out I'm not alone. Verbatim is not being transparent about this, but as some reviewers suggested (and discussed on forums with 1,000s of upvotes), the company is now smacking the M Disc logo on regular blu-rays and selling them. While others have done a deep dive on their manufacturing, or visible differences between old and new M Discs (color, label, etc), I found out with another method: destruction! In years past I've recorded dozens of M Discs, but had to destroy one or two. Maybe certain files were incomplete or missing or outdated, and I no longer wanted that M Disc to be my archival copy despite thinking it at the time. Instead of just chucking it, I would destroy the M Disc for security reasons, and replace it. Those didn't break easily. They're tougher to snap or pass through a household shredder. They were stubborn to break, or at least more stubborn than a standard blu-ray. Not anymore. Recently I had to replace a newer M Disc for whatever reason, and it snapped like butter. Passed through the shredder like a credit card. That alone makes it obvious Verbatim has backed down on quality, if not the efficiency, of M Disc and its stated purpose. For further consideration, see my images for the visual differences that could be clue enough (left is an older M Disc, right is recent).

These are the highest standard Blu-Ray blanks and they are priced this high for very good reason. If you require data backup that is absolutely critical then this is the right choice. These are not for your casual everyday backups, this is for long term secure archiving so choose wisely when it comes to what you'll be using these for.

First things first: these are Verbatim #98089 discs, and they write just fine on my LG BE16NU50, using Power2Go. Their media ID (MID) is "MILLEN-MR1-000", which means they were manufactured by Milleniata, Inc. I've burned 8 full discs with no coasters. But are they really going to last decades, or even hundreds of years? Setting aside M-Disc, there are basically 2 types of BD-R discs. The LTH (low-to-high) discs use organic dye. The HTL discs use "a single recording layer (bismuth nitride and germanium nitride, palladium-doped tellurium suboxide, tellurium) or a pair of layers (copper alloy and silicon) that combine during recording. Read section 14 of Hugh's News' "The Authoritative Blu-ray Disc (BD) FAQ" for more info. All you need to know is that HTL discs use inorganic materials, JUST LIKE M-DISC. My gut tells me that these discs are no better or worse than high-quality HTL discs. I'll be checking the integrity of these discs every 5 years, and of course I'll have another backup (external HDD). I assume that by 2032 (in 15 years), something much better will be available for archival storage.

Just bought these and just burned the first one. Successful burn, no issues. Actual capacity shows up as 100.1 GB in MacOS. MacOS said it will attempt a burn at 4x, but actual burn speed was 2x, so it took 3 hours to burn 95 GB to it, plus anther 1.5 hours for verification. But whatever, my main concern is for the data to be written correctly, which seems like it is. So far, so good.

I love this discs. They are the only ones that guarantee that the images or data stored in them will last for decades to come. Unfortunately, they are monumentally expensive, therefore you will need to decide which documents/photos/data is so important that you are willing to use These discs to save it. In the past, I have bought the 50 GB version, however, I feel like the 100 GB version is a much better fit, considering the large data requirements that people have these days. All in all, I find this discs to be amazing, I just wish they were a little bit cheaper. And then I would probably buy them a lot more frequently