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The top comment is, > That's insane, they are betting on "no one will notice" and when people's fake m-discs fall apart in 10-20 years their money will be long

The top comment is, > That's insane, they are betting on "no one will notice" and when people's fake m-discs fall apart in 10-20 years their money will be long gone. For those who know more than me, is this accurate? Will the replacement disks indeed be less durable? M-discs are apparently supposed to last a thousand years - the suggestion of replacing with a lower quality, cheaper one which will cause problems in future is unpleasantly plausible in our cost-cutting world. I'm reminded of Western Digital quietly changing their backup-quality Red drives in 2020 [1], which was similarly a replacement of underlying technology under the same brand and purpose. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...

jiveturkey 4y ago
> M-discs are apparently supposed to last a thousand years Only true for the DVD flavor. BD doesn't have that guarantee, AFAIK no durability guarantees at all.
washadjeffmad 4y ago
SMR drives aren't lower quality or cheaper, though, and are used in production storage arrays. A NAS is also "not a backup". The panic was mostly driven by people removing the hard drives from WD EasyStores to take advantage of the significantly lower cost per TB for repurposed Red and White label HDDs and a loophole regarding the warranty. This happened at the height of the Chia boom when decom disk shelves went from being e-waste to costing MSRP and the supply of large format storage dried up. Many people learned that year that a hard drive is not just a hard drive. WD did change the <6TB WD Red NAS drives to SMR, but SMR drives aren't less reliable or unsuitable for use in prosumer NAS products. CMR and SMR shouldn't be mixed, but they weren't shipping mixed batches.

jiveturkey 4y ago

> M-discs are apparently supposed to last a thousand years Only true for the DVD flavor. BD doesn't have that guarantee, AFAIK no durability guarantees at all.

washadjeffmad 4y ago

SMR drives aren't lower quality or cheaper, though, and are used in production storage arrays. A NAS is also "not a backup". The panic was mostly driven by people removing the hard drives from WD EasyStores to take advantage of the significantly lower cost per TB for repurposed Red and White label HDDs and a loophole regarding the warranty. This happened at the height of the Chia boom when decom disk shelves went from being e-waste to costing MSRP and the supply of large format storage dried up. Many people learned that year that a hard drive is not just a hard drive. WD did change the <6TB WD Red NAS drives to SMR, but SMR drives aren't less reliable or unsuitable for use in prosumer NAS products. CMR and SMR shouldn't be mixed, but they weren't shipping mixed batches.