Handling large volumes of physical media can be a bit of a chore, whether it’s about duplication or archiving. Fortunately this is a perfect excuse for building robotic contraptions, with the robots for handling optical media being both fascinating and mildly frustrating. When [Shelby Jueden] of Tech Tangents fame was looking at using these optical media robots for archival purposes, the biggest hurdle turned out to be with the optical drives, despite these Aleratec units being primarily advertised for disc duplication.
Both of the units are connected to a PC by USB, but operate mostly standalone, with a documented protocol for the basic unit that makes using it quite easy to use for ripping. This is unlike the larger, triple-drive unit, which had no documented protocol. This meant having to sniff the USB traffic that the original, very limited, software sends to the robot. The protocol has now been documented and published on the Tech Tangents Wiki for this Aleratec Auto Publisher LS.
Where [Shelby] hit a bit of a brick wall was with mixed-media discs, which standalone DVD players are fine with, but typical IDE/SATA optical drives often struggle with. During the subsequent search for a better drive, the internals of the robot were upgraded from IDE to SATA, but calibrating the robot for the new drives led [Shelby] down a maddening cascade of issues. Yet even after making one type of drive work, the mixed-media issue reared its head again with mixed audio and data, leaving the drive for now as an imperfect, but very efficient, ripper for game and multimedia content, perhaps until the Perfect Optical Drive can be found.
Pioneer 107d
I used to work for a company who did DRM on optical disks. That meant lots of testing, as (unlike some of our competitors), we were pretty strong on it not interfering with legal usage. To assist in all this, we had a few robots – some like these, and bigger 4-drive / 5 stack things.
We had to reverse engineer them to use them for duplication and testing.
Firstly, the serial ones were far simpler to work with. The USB ones we found tended to drop connection occasionally.
They came with pretty naff drives (from a features POV), which we needed to replace, in some cases with specific other drives (sometimes with special firmware, control boards, etc). This is where the real fun was.
They came with custom drives, adapted to eject further than normal, and to eject to a more reliable position.
Every drive that went into a robot thus needed to be hacked to fit – removing bezels, adjusting end stops, even cutting out parts of the case occasionally – to do what we could to make the drive trays open to a repeatable position. And the drives would sometimes drop the disc in an erratic position on the tray, further increasing the chance of failure.
The whole thing was further complicated by often having the drives connected to different PCs for various reasons.
Then we had to test them, which I did by making them play towers of Hanoi with CDs over the weekend.
Despite all that, you could guarantee it’d crash when you actually needed it 😭
Fun days.
Yeah, not sad optical media has died! 😂
I was thinking about this recently for archival storage actually, using a shitload of blank DVDs or bluray disks….for however long those still get made.
Considering that you can’t buy reliably good quality blanks anymore, for 20 years now, archiving on DVDs is asking for more trouble than it’s worth.
I suppose you could burn three copies of each disc, and when they inevitably rot and develop unrecoverable errors, you can at least hope to reconstruct the data.
I wouldnt buy them off amazon (fakes) but Ritek and Verbatim BluRay M Disks are still very available and they really do not inevitably rot nor develop unrecoverable errors. Only downside is the whole write once dynamic, but if youre archiving thats not an issue.
I’ve seen many ” 100 year” discs come and go, and the story was always the same. First batches seem promising, then quality control goes and the stuff that ends up on the market is whatever slop.
There’s no control because there’s no repercussions. The discs are bad – so what? They never promised you anything more than a new disc for warranty. It just takes people 5-10 years to notice that the discs are getting corrupted.
Point in case:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_verbatim_no_longer_sells_real_m_discs_now/
“I emailed Verbatim’s customer service and prepared a bunch of images that show these fake M Discs next to real ones. But to my surprise, after a debate with customer service they told me that these are not fakes, and that these “are the only M Discs that are going to be sold from now on” (quote). What’s insane is that these discs currently being sold are not M Discs at all, but regular organic layer Verbatim BD-Rs, yet Verbatim still calls these M Disc.”
As for Ritek, I asked duck.ai to list the best and worst reported brands of BD-R discs and their typical failures, and Ritek was among the worst listed.
“High variance in quality; higher coaster rates and poor longevity reported.”
And indeed, when you look at old forum posts, there are people who swear by them, and people who complain that their discs rot in 3 months even though they test perfect right after burning.
That’s what all the manufacturers do. They push good batches and bad batches, whatever happens to come out of the production lines, because nobody is keeping accounts. Nobody knows whether they’re good or bad until years later, unless they’re really bad, at which point they address the problems and do a bit of PR face lifting, change the logo or the color of the wrapper and go “New and improved!”. For a while it is until they let the quality control slip again to save money and make profit.
It’s called the lemon market: when the consumers can’t trust the product and can’t evaluate the quality until it’s too late, which makes it impossible to compete with quality, even those whose products were initially good will eventually sell the same crud as the fakers.
Some guy on reddit said some Verbatim customer service agent said that Mdisc are all fake now. MMHMMM yeah. Thats some reliable source youve got there. Im sure their website is just lying.
https://www.verbatim.com/en/m-disc/products/43825-m-disc-bd-r-25gb-4x-limited-archival-10pk
“Unlike traditional optical media, which utilize dyes that can break down over time, data stored on an M DISC is engraved on a patented inorganic write layer – it will not fade or deteriorate. ”
“ISO/IEC 16963 standard longevity tests have proven the durability of M DISC technology, and it withstood rigorous testing by the US Department of Defense. Based on ISO/IEC 16963 testing, M DISC media has a projected lifetime of several hundred years.”
You better run and edit wikipedia which explains:
“Early in 2022, Verbatim changed the formulation of their M-DISC branded Blu-rays. These new discs could be written at a faster rate than the previous ones – 6× speed instead of 4×. The new discs also had different colouration and markings compared with older version.
Later in the year customers accused Verbatim of selling an inferior product and deceptive marketing.
Verbatim responded that the new discs were a further development of the older discs and should have the same longevity, and that the technical changes therein were responsible for the altered appearance and higher write speeds.
The updated M-DISC currently sold on the market uses the same metal ablative layer (MABL) metal oxide inorganic recording layer used in many of Verbatim’s regular Blu-ray products.”
That’s the point. Whatever could be said of the earlier M-DISC does not apply any longer because it isn’t the same product. Whether it’s better or worse will be decided – years later.
Is the current M-DISC simply picked out of the normal disc production line, randomly tested, and deemed “just as good”? Is that what makes it more expensive than the regular ones, and the regular ones are simply the batches that failed testing?
Note that you can’t test them non-destructively, so you have to use random sampling and derive a probability that the entire batch is “good” or “bad”. That means there’s still variability – just that it’s within acceptable bounds. That means you still got to keep sampling the discs yourself and gambling whether THIS disc out of THIS lot is good or bad according to your demands.
Also note that regular CD-R/W discs subjected to the ISO/IEC accelerated testing also promise 30-100 year lifespan – as a selling point – but are found to break down in months to couple years in practice as the actual quality of the discs goes up and down over the years. Just because it passes the test under ideal conditions does not mean the discs are good for archiving.
Again because there’s no real consequences to the manufacturer to pass on bad QC. So NASA found out 20 years later that all the M-DISCs are corrupted? Then what? Nothing. The CEO of the company has retired and nobody cares.
but which options are left for archival ? harddiscs do not last forever…
Tape.
Hard disks typically last longer than your average home-burned optical discs, and come with the advantage of higher data rates and storage density. Just as with anything, you have to keep migrating your data to newer devices if only for the point that the physical interfaces and the file systems keep on moving forwards, so you’re not left with a situation of having a disc but no drive to read it.
I was contemplating using spinning disks (plastic and rust) for archival storage. But then I considered LTO tape and it actually worked out really well for me. I pay about $3/TB for blank LTO5 tapes. The used tape drive was about $150, and a cheap HBA card was under $50. It does writes at a steady 140MB/s, so it’s pretty fast too. LTO6 is becoming affordable on eBay too. Data stored on tape should last reliable for about 30 years. In 10 years I’ll probably upgrade to LTO7 or LTO8 if it becomes affordable.
RIP Gulliver.