Millenniata's M-Disc and Cranberry DiamonDisc?

[Reading Bug]

I thought I would post these two articles (the first one from just a couple days ago) in the hopes of generating discussion. Both formats sound quite interesting, and perhaps promising, but obviously can't offer much in proven credibility. Nor does either article go beyond layman literature to offer much in technicality.

Nevertheless I'd love to hear some opinions. How accurate do these articles sound? How do these technologies appear to build upon previous optical formats?

Quote:

Start-up to release 'stone-like' optical disc that lasts forever
New optical disc aims for consumer market first, then corporate archives

By Lucas Mearian
August 8, 2011 06:05 AM ET

Computerworld - Start-up Millenniata and Hitachi-LG Data Storage plan to soon release a new optical disc and read/write player that will store movies, photos or any other data forever. The data can be accessed using any current DVD or Blu-ray player.

Millenniata calls the product the M-Disc, and the company claims you can dip it in liquid nitrogen and then boiling water without harming it. It also has a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) study backing up the resiliency of its product compared to other leading optical disc competitors.

Millenniata CEO Scott Shumway would not disclose what material is used to produce the optical discs, referring to it only as a "natural" substance that is "stone-like."

Like DVDs and Blu-ray discs, the M-Disc platters are made up of multiple layers of material. But unlike the former, there is no reflective or die layer. Instead, during the recording process a laser "etches" pits onto the substrate material.

"Once the mark is made, it's permanent," Shumway said. "It can be read on any machine that can read a DVD. And it's backward compatible, so it doesn't require a special machine to read it - just a special machine to write it."

While Millenniata has partnered with Hitachi-LG Data Storage for the initial launch of an M-Disc read-write player in early October, Shumway said any DVD player maker will be able to produce M-Disc machines by simply upgrading their product's firmware.

Millenniata said it has also proven it can produce Blu-ray format discs with its technology - a product it plans to release in future iterations. For now, the platters store the same amount of data as a DVD: 4.7GB. However, the discs write at only 4x or 5.28MB/sec, half the speed of today's DVD players.

"We feel if we can move to the 8X, that'd be great, but we can live with the four for now," Shumway said, adding that his engineers are working on upping the speed of recording.

Millenniata is also targeting the long-term data archive market, saying archivists will no longer have to worry about controlling the temperature or humidity of a storage room. "Data rot happens with any type of disc you have. Right now, the most permanent technology out there for storing information is a paper and pencil -- until now," Shumway said.

In 2009, the Defense Department's Naval Air Warfare Weapon's Division facility at China Lake, Calif. was interested in digitizing and permanently storing information. So it tested Millenniata's M-Disc against five other optical disc vendors: Delkin Devices, Mitsubishi, JVC, Verbatim and MAM-A.

"None of the Millenniata media suffered any data degradation at all. Every other brand tested showed large increases in data errors after the stress period. Many of the discs were so damaged that they could not be recognized as DVDs by the disc analyzer," the department's report states.

Recordable optical media such as CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs are made of layers of polycarbonate glued together. One layer of the disk contains a reflective material and a layer just above it incorporates an organic transparent dye. During recording, a laser hits the die layer and burns it, changing the dye from transparent to opaque creating bits of data. A low power laser then can read those bits by either passing through the transparent dye layer to the reflective layer or being absorbed by the pits.

Over long periods of time, DVDs are subject to de-lamination problems where the layers of polycarbonate separate, leading to oxidation and read problems. The dye layer, because its organic, can also break down over time, a process hastened by high temperatures and humidity.

While the DVD industry claims DVDs should last from 50 to 100 years, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), DVDs can break down in "several years" in normal environments. Additionally, NIST suggests DVDs should be stored in spaces where relative humidity is between 20% and 50, and where temperatures do not drop below 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gene Ruth, a research director at Gartner, said generally he's not heard of a problem with DVD longevity. And, while he admits that a DVD on a car dashboard could be in trouble, the medium has generally had a good track record.

But Ruth said he can see a market in long-term archiving for a product such as the M-Disc because some industries, such as aircraft engineering, healthcare and financial services, store data for a lifetime and beyond.
Millenniata partnered with Hitachi-LG Data Storage to provide M-Ready technology in most of its DVD and Blu-ray drives. Shumway said the products will begin shipping next month and should be in stores in the beginning of October.

"We felt it was important that we first produce this with a major drive manufacturer, someone that already had models and firmware out there," Shumway said.

Unlike DVDs, which come in 10-, 25-, 50- or 100-disc packs, M-Discs will be available one at a time, or in groups of two or three for just under $3 per disc. Millenniata is also courting system manufacturers in the corporate archive world.

"We're working with some very large channels as we train their distribution networks to launch this," he said. "At the same time, we're launching this at Fry's [Electronics] so consumers can see it and be introduced to this technology."

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...?taxonomyId=19

[Reading Bug]

Quote:

Cranberry DiamonDisc DVD Preserve Your Digital Photos for Centuries at $34.95

2009-11-07 23:06

The Library of Congress warns,"Storage media such as compact discs and DVDs that were thought to last, don't -- they often fail within a few years." Millenniata, the inventor of the Cranberry DiamonDisc, developed a diamond-like DVD technology that will last for centuries and is not susceptible to failure. The Cranberry DiamonDisc has no adhesive layers, dye layer or reflective layer to deteriorate. A high-intensity laser physically etches information like your photos into the diamond-like surface of the synthetic stone disc. The good news is that the format is the same as any other DVD so it is fully backwards-compatible and can be read by any DVD player in any computer and is fully platform-independent.

You can only purchase your Cranberry DiamonDisc online and upload your data starting at $34.95 for a single 4.7GB disc. Burning your own DVDs is an option too, the special DiamonDisc writer with 150 Blank Cranberry Discs is selling for $4,995. Check out the following press release for more information.

You can also check out a similar solution from a US startup called Millenniata who developed the Millennial M-ARC Disc, currently costs $12 per disc. Writing to it requires Millenniata's M-Writer Drive manufactured by Pioneer, which currently lists for $2,500. More information can be found in this recent article.

http://www.dslrphoto.com/dslr/cranbe...3495,9367.html

[lordsmurf]

Hmmm... I wonder if the CEO of Millenniata is of any relation to Gordon Shumway? (Google him, if you're not familiar with that name.)
Anyway...

I can be easy to aggravate sometimes, and these articles quickly find my pressure points. The articles come from the Fox News school of presenting information (FUD, a.k.a. fear/uncertainty/doubt), and are propaganda more than anything else. As a former PR writer and news reporter (in print), I can pretty much guarantee these were regurgitated press releases from Millenniata -- not the quality writings of skilled journalists taking time to investigate what's what.

That the second article has an unverifiable/unreferenced quote from LOC pretty much robs it of any credibility right away. It may as well just read, "Our government says 'boogey, boogey, boogey!!!'"

I don't have a lot of time today, but I do want to touch on a few quick and obvious points.

The Millenniata comparisons are silly. Ridiculous.

1. Verbatim is Mitsubishi, and Mitsubishi is Verbatim. At the risk of offending somebody, the only word I can come up with is "retarded" when looking at their comparisons chart at the official site.
2. Delkin is MAM-A.
3. Taiyo Yuden is JVC, and JVC is Taiyo Yuden.

That this company tested these discs twice and came up with different results is amusing. That they don't seem to know anything about the underlying manufacturers of media leaves a reasonable doubt wide enough to drive a truck through it.

True, sometimes you'll find TY discs under Verbatim name in Europe, or junky grade CMC/Ritek in the Value/Life brands of Verbatim in the USA. But even then, there's no such thing as a "Verbatim" disc -- it's just a branding to an actual disc.

The attempt by the article to make M-Disc look like a "new format" is similar to the narcissistic idiocy of Karl Wagner (online named "kwag") who would pretend his non-compliance to DVD-Video or VCD standards somehow made a "new format" (KVCD, KDVD). That was pretty much laughed out of mainstream video forums, and M-Disc will share that same fate if that's how they want to approach it. When it comes to technology marketed to advanced users, you can't treat them as if they were as stupid as the average Best Buy consumer. That may work on Ma and Pa Kettle, but photographers and archivists worth a salt will be far more scrutinizing.

An M-Disc is really nothing more than a DVD using inorganic materials, instead of organic dyes. It's not much different from DVD+R, another unofficial DVD sub-format that requires special DVD+R capable equipment to write, but can be read by any DVD format player/ROM.

This is the only accurate information I saw in the first article: "Gene Ruth, a research director at Gartner, said generally he's not heard of a problem with DVD longevity. And, while he admits that a DVD on a car dashboard could be in trouble, the medium has generally had a good track record."

The M-Disc video on Youtube shows the "average" lifespan of a DVD to me 6 months to 5 years. I'd go so far as to call that a lie. A fib. A nose grower that even Pinnochio would know better than to tell. Most DVDs have lasted at least 10 years now. Most. A decade. Where they pull these random numbers from is beyond me.

One of the most crucial fail points of a blank DVD is the adhesive layer -- the bonding that smushes the layers of the disc platter together. The M-Disc still has this layer, and adhesives don't last forever. Most won't even last 100 years -- the idea that you'll get a millennia from an optical disc is to live in a world divorced from reality.

I also question the idea that oxygen won't affect this DVD type. Oxygen affects everything.

Sure, it would be great if somebody has finally invented a technology that can rival the more permanent mediums of yesteryear. But I'm not going to buy into hype and promises by nobodies. We already had the "gold DVD" hype thrown at us for years, and those discs have turned out to be lousy (by the consensus of most experienced optical users and archivists).

To date, I'm not aware of any independent researcher (individual or group) having verified any portion of any claims made by these two companies in the last two years. No, that DOD test does not count, because details on the relationship or testing methods are unavailable even in summary form. High prices, lots of promises ... and that's all we get.

To top it off, Millenniata partnered with one of the most lousy drives makers there is -- LG.

Yes, I probably have a pretty harsh tone here -- but again, articles like this just rub me the wrong way. It's not serving any greater good, it's just re-advertising and spreading company propaganda. The authors of those articles should hang their heads in shame. Research before you publish.

DSLRphoto.com is just a spam blog anyway -- not a real site with quality content. They'll republish any ol' piece of crap just to push out "content" that brings in traffic for their ads and affiliate clicks. It's not a useful website of any kind.

I could debunk a lot of this in further detail, but I'm stretched for time right now. I'll expand on this further at some point in the future.

I'll leave you with this folksy saying: "Mama didn't raise no sucker."

[pepst]

By the way, Millenniata's M-Disc are actually made by Northern Star from Czech republic. This company also make their own inorganic "archival" media, called "Data Tresor Disc": http://datatresordisc.eu/introduction-page-dtd.html

[g78alx]

Hello,
I'm considering trying the datatresor dvd but need to know if my LG GH22LP20 drive is compatible.
Thank you

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by g78alx

Hello,
I'm considering trying the datatresor dvd but need to know if my LG GH22LP20 drive is compatible.
Thank you

Why? The media is not great. You'll do better with standard Taiyo Yuden or Mitsubishi Verbatim.