In retrospect, it did give me time to find the more color-appropriate blue marker.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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I used to hoof it at 16x on single-layer DVD+R discs back in the day (talking 20 years ago at this point), whole disc done in about 5 minutes. Never had an issue with those.
The phenomenon you're referring to is called "Zoned Constant Linear Velocity", for anyone looking for a new Wikipedia reading rabbit hole :)
Can't say I ever tried a dual-layer blank, can only imagine they're a bit more touchy about speeds and feeds.
Oof. Yeah, I've had the pleasure of burning a few double layer discs before, I wouldn't go over 2X speed with those (the blanks aren't exactly cheap).
Glad you had good luck on 16X back then, but are they holding up these days? 🤔
I dunno, but I always kept my burn speeds dialed back to reliable safe levels. You only gotta burn it once, so go drink a beer and smoke a joint with some friends while it burns.
You only gotta burn it once, so why rush it? You want a reliable disc that reads reliably hundreds if not thousands of times..
Most media is low quality nowadays, even common brands. For example, there hasn't been no real M-Disc media for sale for years, the original manufacturer has ceased operations. What is called M-Disc that you find in the shelfs are organic discs, they will degrade in a few years. Resellers, specially big names, just don't care.
Verbatim still makes archive quality (non-organic) M-Disc, even in BDXL.
None of the BD are made with the original Millenniata substrate.
The '1,000-year' disc that failed: The weird history of M-Disc
There are other sources for the story.
I think the conclusion that a lot of people in the DH spheres came to is that it seemed to be a change of inorganic material, not necessarily starting to use organic dyes. This change reduced their lifetimes from 1,000 years (with the OG millennia disc) to a few hundred. This would be in the ballpark for high quality MABL discs, which are still inorganic. It's true that the substrate changed, but that didn't make the substrate organic. Your link does not say that they changed to organic dyes, it only mentions organic dyes being the most commonly used and why M-Discs were originally made.
Realistically, I only need my backups to last 50 or so years, and I'm not updating them frequently enough for it to become a hassle. I think as long as you're following the 3-2-1 rule (or 4-3-2) for important data, these can't hurt to have as a part of that solution, and that it's likely that they'll last at least 50 years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1cqn0as/mdisc_questions/
I'm not sure a single Reddit comment is the best source, but I do appreciate that it contains an external link. For example, though, this article (from the same author that the commenter links) goes into it a little bit more visually for a BDXL M-disc from verbatim: https://goughlui.com/2024/10/21/experimenting-with-bdxl-part-1-the-media/
The disc did have the same ID, but it looked different visually compared to Verbatim's standard BD-R. The author stated that they can't be sure either way because of this discrepancy. Keep in mind that it's the same author that the commenter linked to, and the author says that their original article is often misinterpreted.
Even if they are Verbatim's standard discs, which no one has been able to prove conclusively, they are still MABL HTL discs, as that's what Verbatim uses in all of their BD-R regardless.
Further, the comment you linked is also at least somewhat BS. They claim that the BD-R M Discs have always been the standard BD-Rs. Meanwhile, there have been several durability tests of BD-R vs M-discs before the substrate change (remember, by their claim these should have been the same from the start) that have the standard BD-Rs die much more quickly than the M-discs. Such as this: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html
That comment is at least half wrong, because that would not be possible if they were the same from the start.
Your original claim was that they are now organic. That is what I'm pushing back on, because they are still (and always have been) MABL. Do you have anything showing that they use organic dyes?
It would be fun to test, there's still a big disc wallet buried somewhere in the (hot and occasionally humid) garage, undoubtedly including some of those 20 year old ones. Worst possible storage conditions for recordable media.
The larger issue however is there is no longer a single device in the house capable of reading one, and hasn't been for a number of years.
Also a significant fraction of them were Linux install media. Not in the modern nudge-nudge-wink-wink-we're-really-talking-piracy-here "Linux ISOs" sense, but actual Linux ISOs, which would be used a couple of times (maybe even only once) then discarded once superseded by a newer version.
It would be at least another couple of years after that period in history before I could afford a) sufficient hard drive space to not have to burn and delete things straight away after downloading them and b) flash drive(s) large enough to do away with optical media for that use case.