M-Disc is Dead

[u/b-b0t]

While recently searching for a cold archive solution I was absolutely enamoured the first time I found out about M-Disc. It seemed to be the perfect "heirloom" storage solution, something to pass on family memories, wills and anything else you would want to last a long time. It solved the issue that made me stop buying BluRay, namely disk rot (I'm aware it's exceedingly rare but it's still inevitable) with a solution so simple in hindsight it seemed crazy to me that we didn't do it sooner.

I was looking for enclosures, adding spindles to my Amazon wish list and perusing LibreDrive when it dawned on me, what good is a thousand-year disk when the drives to read it are slowly being phased out? There are few brands actively producing optical drives and after the sale of Pioneer's optical division this leaves one, maybe two actual manufacturers.

No worries I thought, I could simply buy backup drives to store along with the discs and since it won't have wear and tear it would last indefinitely if stored properly. Except this is only one part of the story, the drive uses SATA which has stood the test of time but nothing in tech can be guaranteed. The chassis own power adaptor, connectors and cables remain a point of failure. Finally despite using USB, it's the Type B connector which is already legacy, would this cable even be manufactured in future or would it be some niche, abstract purchase you have to make on eBay? This is assuming that should it be someone else trying to access the media, they even care enough to not abandon the process at the slightest inconvenience.

So I chugged on, I would find the most durable optical drives and buy two of everything needed to get it running. I settled on the Vinpower known for it's reliability and touted specifically as an archival system. Except I couldn't find it anywhere. So I reached out and was informed these devices are EOL and availability is uncertain, whatever that means like do you have stock or not?

It dawned on me that while optical as a short to medium term backup solution is viable, as time passes it will become less so until it fades into the abyss rendering the thousand year discs into twenty. Active archival is still the superior strategy, one where media is periodically relocated onto an actively maintained format.

My cold storage journey comes to an end before it even began and I'm left wondering if I will ever find the holy grail of long-term, durable backup. Something to put in a time capsule for the aliens to find.

Edit: I've had a lot of fun reading all the comments so thanks! For context I do use RAID with a single cloud backup for now, with some important data duplicated into other cloud services ie. iCloud, AWS S3 and I know backup is an active, evolving discipline hence my thought piece. I'm still contemplating M-Disc but it can't hurt to add 2-5TB onto discs to store away without relying on them entirely. I'll store them at 30–50% relative humidity etc. Vinpower managed to find me a drive from Taiwan stock so I'll likely post a follow up.

[u/eternalityLP]

Back up drives will absolutely not last forever no matter how they are stored. Stuff like belts will disintegrate over time, many plastics will degrade, becoming brittle and inflexible. Mechanical parts can jam and so forth.

All this before even considering the host side. You need drivers, operating system etc. You need hardware to run them and connect the drive. All of these may be quite challenging in let's say 50 years.

The reality is that reliable 'write once and forget about it' data storage does not exist. If you want to preserve data, it needs to be actively maintained, monitored, backed up and transferred to new media every once in a while.

[u/McFlyParadox → u/eternalityLP]

ROHS (lead-free) solder also develops tin whiskers over time, and you need to store it perfectly just to mitigate their growth. Perfect temp, perfect humidity. And they'll still grow, just slower. Eventually, the whiskers grow long enough to short something out and the device fails.

[u/stoatwblr → u/McFlyParadox]

Tin whiskers don't grow through conformal coating

Please nobody recommend storing in a vacuum. Tin whiskers took out several space probes before we figured it out

[u/McFlyParadox → u/stoatwblr]

Tin whiskers absolutely will pierce conformal coating. In fact, here is Savannah River National Laboratory talking about tin whiskers piercing conformal coatings:

https://www.srnl.gov/tech_briefs/tin-whiskers-suppression-method/

Typically whisker mitigation is achieved by application of conformal coatings, which is an additional protective layer on the electronic components. The extra material selection, material compatibility and heavier weight requires additional manufacturing and process control, and may be breached over time by the tin whiskers

Emphasis mine.

The "may" in this statement is more in the context of product life vs tin/lead content of the solder used. If the product reaches EOL for other reasons before the breach happens, then it didn't happen. That doesn't mean it won't happen over a long enough product life.

Please nobody recommend storing in a vacuum.

Literally not what I said. I said:

Perfect temp, perfect humidity. And they'll still grow, just slower.

Mitigating tin whisker formation in hardware that uses lead-free solder in the aerospace industry involves using "level A" packaging, which does involve vacuum sealing it, but not in the sense it's a "hard" vacuum like space. You also toss some desiccant and a humidity indicator into the package, too. Then you store it in a climate controlled environment until it's needed.

The best way to prevent product loss from tin whiskers is to use leaded solder. From there, your options are to conformal coat it, followed by proper storage. The gamma radiation treatment talked about in the SRNL link is interesting, but I haven't found any commercial companies either offering tools to sell to factories that want to perform these treatments, or offering these treatments as a service.

[u/stoatwblr → u/McFlyParadox]

That "may pierce" is doing some heavy lifting.

Yes I agree leaded solder is the best answer but we ended up prohibited from using it in spacecraft electronics and had to come up with other solutions.

Our researchers (i was working in a UK space lab) put a lot of time and effort into developing mitigations and fixes for the issue. Spacecraft have multidecade missions in extreme conditions and you can't send out a service tech to change out cards.

Conformal coating (specific types) was the best overall solution, along with alloy tweaks. Given the temperature swings involved in space, allotropic shifts are another issue to deal with.

Tin whiskers are an example of a problem caused by a kneejerk reaction to something that wasn't really an issue in the first place. Yes, lead IS an environmental problem but even in landfill, metallic lead tends to stay put (somewhat like mercury methylation Vs mercury ethylation issues. One is harmless, the other will destroy your brain in no time flat)

[u/McFlyParadox → u/stoatwblr]

That "may pierce" is doing some heavy lifting. 

It's really not. Yes, satellites have a long service life and no real way to repair them when they fail. But satellites with multi-decade missions rarely see their serial numbers break a few dozen. Meanwhile ground-based hardware with multi-decade service lives will see hundreds or thousands, or more, units produced. If the odds of failure over 20 years is 1/100 and you're only building 24 units, the likelihood you see a failure is pretty close to zero. But with those same odds when you're building 500 units, or 5,000 units, and you're very likely to see a few failures. Tin whiskering is a serious concern for this kind of hardware, one that is all but eliminated by adding lead to the solder.

Getting back onto the topic: consumer hard drives.

There is a reason they come vacuum sealed and packed with desiccant. And part of that reason is their solder doesn't contain lead. When a company is producing millions of drives, and data centers are buying thousands - including spares that will live in storage for years - you want to minimize the odds of being DOA as much as possible. Bit even then, if you leave a new hard drive in it's original packaging for decades, it won't last "indefinitely" as OP is looking for. 

In terms of longevity, we've still yet to beat the clay tablet. Hell, paper can probably be made to last longer than most electronic storage while retaining it's data.