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For those still into blu-ray discs I present the legendary LG WH16NS40.
[Prime] LG WH16NS40 5.25" Internal SATA 16x Blu-Ray Disc Rewriter $81.45 Delivered @ Amazon US via AU
980
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I remember back in the days when new burner speed comes up, I "upgrade" my CD writer/ burner. FML.
I always had two drives so i could do "on the fly" copies.. feel like it failed most of the time and writable discs were exy for a teen.
Nero is the GOAT
Best way before we got high speed internet was to go to LAN meets and download gigs (which was a lot back then) of files and then burn then to disc. LOL
All the time I spent learning how to burn a perfect redbook cd. All the little tricks you need to know about to get it to playback properly on all CD players even early ones, to have the gaps present properly, all of it. Such a waste of time.
@AustriaBargain: I disagree.
It's better than getting your brain corrupted by social media in this day and age.
Buffer underun error with the "Oh Nooo" sound lol..
oh maybe the "Oh Nooo" sound was from ImgBurn or CloneDVD, can't remember haha
Nero! Oh yes
Nero ultra buffer and Asus FlextraLink saved so many disks from becoming coasters for me.
I don't think we'll see 72x CD drives (the Kenwood one) or 20X DVD drives ever again.
yeah, write buffer empty…… Was so happy when I got one that could do stop / starts.
on the fly was too risky for me, couldn't risk losing one of my verbatim/auspost discs because of an error. Those 25 disc spindles weren't cheap for a hs student
When a firmware revision doubled your write speed……those were the days.
and whoever owned one was making it back 6x being a pirate
I think I sold enough at uni to pay for my degree. I say that as I didnt use the money to pay off the degree but wasted it as a young adult
Walan (gmullabuggy)
Or was it ocau I forget
Made me think of The Matrix where Neo is churning out hacked software on discs to sell lol
Yep, what a time to be alive though, borrowing and returning PSX new release games from Blockbuster the same night 😏 and then downloading patches to get around copy protection for some games. It genuinely was a very fun time of my life.
Lol yep pirate life through the entire blockbuster collection
Oh yeah, I felt like such a hacker. And some games were very specific to the type of writable disc, and also rumours that burning on a low speed better guaranteed success..
You didn't chip your PSX like I did to allow for pirated games to work? We had a production line going at my work - actually 2 productions lines:
1. 1 person with a soldering iron soldering the chip onto all of our PSXs
2. Another guy making "backup copies" of PSX games that we borrowed from video storesAh the memories….
I had a soldered chip (from infamous Laverton Market VIC where so many pirates were targetted in stings), but some games still had copy protection that you had to patch the ISOs for before burning on the disc. e.g. FFIX had Libcrypt copy protection.
Otherwise it wouldn't boot on a modded PSX. This is because the original discs had errors that would cause issues and couldn't properly be copied. Simplified explanation.
I once had a special dvd drive that can dump wii / gamecube games.. i remember it was hard to find specific model with special firmware.
Some games like Spyro 3 had extra copy protection which could detect when the game was pirated and ruin the experience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GYSeXLr5sYNope.. never needed to on my Playstation 1 - I had the 1st gen Japanese release with OG 1.0 firmware that allows you to play everything backup with a spring on the CD tray trick. "Boot" up the console with a legit CD by powering it on and going into save menu. Switcheroo the CD with the "backup" and it will play anything from there. LOL.
We had a production line going at my work - actually 2 productions lines:
Where did you work? lol
Same but for Civic Video for me. I was late to the party, but Civic carried PS1 games literally til they closed like 10 years ago. When I realized I could do the same with the CD based PS2 games I shit my pants and was always on the look for the blue disc wonders.
I remember burning copies of Lego Star Wars 1 in my two CD Windows 2000 monster box for mates for Christmas on a stack of MTV branded CDR from Coles. Golden.
Honestly, I look fondly on those times. It was so much fun. Nostalgia.
Hahaha i still rmemeber PSXCOPYWORLD. COOOM / gamecopyworld / consolecopy world! All the patches lol
LH C:\DOS\MSCDEXE.EXE
The days when we had a competition to load up as much stuff into Highmem and seeing who had the most base memory left out of 640KB. LOL..
Yep! Had the JVC brand And it took about 6 discs to get 1 disc right each after about 2+ hrs of wait times! Those were the days! Software was Nero if I remember correctly. 🥸🥸🥸
Ahh Nero haha. I used that and Fireburner
Nero Burn baby. Those were the days.
Did anyone pay for Nero?
With a 28.8kbps modem, that dial up sound, going in stealth mode to pirated sites for MP3’s. Then making your own mixed cd’s Those were the days 😂
I remember borrow library's DVD then use Nero. God, I'm feel old…
I remember buying a triple speed burner for $900. Still had to use a caddy in the drive. Not one of those fancy pants caddy-less models for me.
I remember transfering one zipped/winrar song over multiple floppy disks!
I knew this guy with a small music studio and he bought the first series of Yamaha burner. After a month he decorated the studio walls with failed discs and he could not remember how many times he called Yamaha support, who knew next to nothing on how to set it up. I met him after he had given up on the Yamaha. I said I would take a look. I enabled caching for the drive on his very expensive computer and it started to work, very happy he was.
Better stockpile some blanks
Yeah they're ending blank blu-rays soon.
Yeah nah. M-Disc is the only format that you can reliably data archive on knowing it'll definitely last decades. Everything else… EVERYTHING ELSE will suffer data integrity issues. All your hard drives, CD drives, flash memory, Micro SD etc…. all of it is useless as a data backup.
Its why they tell you to test your backups, but not many people do lol
I ran across this recently that concerned me….
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/111q0vh/verbat…
I had no idea about M-discs until this post. Will definitely back up my photos off my synology nas now with this.
wot dis?!
A cup holder for your pc. lol
Some people are interested in this drive because with certain version of firmware (1.02), the drive could be used to rip UHD blu ray discs.
I bought this exact one a few years ago because I figured I might still have a need to rip and burn stuff… still don't think I've even used it 😆
I did buy this too and actually used it for that reason. Paid about double this price for it tho, maybe more. Its still sitting in my i7 rig from 2013 lol
Get an external one.
If you don’t need it all too frequently, an adapter to USB can do the trick for not much. I use my desktop UHD drive without putting it in any case/chasis.
Externals drives cleaner, but as others noted this models popular for its ability to be flashed to support UHD ripping.
Over burning was the game changer.
the 80 minutes CDs
This needs to be in a museum not Ozbargain
You can use this drive to rip 4K Blu-ray discs.
upcoming rush of IT people needing to reinstall windows after Fridays efforts
Please insert the boot disk……..
Didn't the news say they are going to stop making writable blu ray discs?
Was just one company stopping, few others still will
I think Japanese companies (Sony, Panasonic) stop making blu ray recordable discs in Japan. It has been quite difficult to get BD-R DL and XL discs made in Japan here for quite some time.
I still prefer Japanese made recordable discs, they tend to last longer.
Thats funny as they only just stopped using floppy disks in Japan. Up until recently it was a requirement to have your resume on a floppy disk in Japan which was clearly an outdated thing. They only just started updating these requirements and i remember reading an article on it.
I think recordable discs will still be available, except made in Taiwan or China or other countries. There isn't enough demand in Japan to continue making them there (cost too much).
They still use fax machines a lot too
Only Sony brand
Tempted to buy as a backup for making backups
Meh I'll wait for the new Petabyte Disc Writers
Gunna be a while mate… the people that invented it only released the paper on it earlier this year :).
Years for it to be retail, and considering its data capacity THOUSANDS of dollars.Exactly, USB NVMe's are good enough atm
They won't want to wait too long. Standards that mess around getting to market always get beaten to the post like HD-DVD.
Agreed!
Petabyte discs definitely look the goods and have the potential to really change how large amounts of data is stored.
But I don't reckon we'll see anything for at least 5 years. Longer.@UFO: It would be a game changer for datacentres; entire storage arrays of data could be written to a single disc.
Be difficult with current enterprise and consumer data bus speed standards to access it on demand across many users though.
@buffalo bill: Pretty sure they would use NVME in front for caching the most commonly accessed resources.
Lots of people commenting who have no clue on what M-Disc is :).
For data archiving, M-Disc is far superior to anything else available.Also, this drive is basically MAKEMKV lore. So if you want to back up your 4K movies, THIS thing is magic.
M-discs are too expensive and most of them are no longer made in Japan.
Also, we are spoiled by SSD and cloud streaming.
How so? If $100 (pack of 5 discs of 100Gb each) is too much money to store family photos and videos (I'm assuming 500Gb would cover that easily for most people), then you aren't taking data backup seriously enough.
And relying only on cloud storage for all my kids photos?!? Yeah no thanks. Cyber crime, system failures, anything 'connected' is risky. Off site, cold storage… multiple copies. Gold standard.
Believe me, when your family photo back up drive fails you're gunna pony up hundreds, if not thousands for someone to get that irreplaceable data back.
Nearly every single comment above ridiculing this drive as an antiquated product are in for a rude shock in about a decade when their backup hard drives with all their precious family photos stored away in a cupboard somewhere doesn't work.
Get educated folks. Flash discs, NVME, Micro-SD, and hard drives are NOT back ups that'll last.
Up to 5-10 years tops…. then you start getting data degradation (ie LOSS OF DATA!).Do yourselves a favour and change your data archiving now. M-Disc can theoretically last 1000 years.
But you only need to get to say 20 years reliably until the next jump in data storage technology occurs.I sound like an M-Disc salesman, but it really is that good. Google if you don't believe me. For data archiving (proper long term storage), nothing else compares. It's not standard CD, DVD, or Blu-ray… don't lump it in with those as they are also poor long term storage.
I have a few concerns:
- Review feedback comments from people having bad experience with M-Discs which are not made in Japan.
- I generally don't bother checking the burn quality after a disc backup (and the only software I know is really dated and when I tried to buy a copy, the site didn't work properly).
- I found dodgy SATA cables can lead to weird writer behaviour, result in bad quality disc burns.
- Also, the really nice figures quoted for M-Discs were based on DVD type of M-Discs. If we assume BD-Rs lasting shorter than DVD-Rs, then it is best to assume M-Discs with such a large amount of data will also lead to reduction of lifetime.
If I can get made in Japan M-Discs, then I might consider. However, if you can show us a quality scan of one of your M-discs, then that will be more convincing (preferably a M-disc that's not made in Japan). In theory, the jitter level and BIS should both be top notch.
My current issue is way too many discs and searching through them is a pain. Also, new PC cases are generally not designed to have optical drive bays.
@netsurfer: I'm not here to convince you one way or the other, you sound like you've made up your mind regardless so no worries.
I just provided my opinion for people to better research their data archiving options, because most people have no clue on how fragile a hard drive or memory card is for storing data long term. The shock and expense comes later when they NEED that backup. Then the learning begins.
If you believe M-Disc isn't for you and you have better alternative in your mind, go with that. Good luck with whatever you go with.
@UFO: I feel if I can still get hold of M-Discs for DVD type made by the original creator of M-Disc, then I might get some.
I have multiple of these drives because it will be no good if I don't have devices to read discs in the long run (even if the discs can last a long time). However, backing up huge amount of data on discs takes too long and that can lead to not having enough backups.
Another annoyance is due to the slowness of optical media, reading through it with lots of directories and files is really slow (and even burning one can take ages). As such, I am using ISO or zip/7zip format to reduce the number of files.
Cloud backup does make sense for general public, especially non tech savvy people. The reason is simple, 1 backup is better than 0 backup.
The most concerning discussions are these two:
Verbatim has been marketing cheaper Blu-Ray blanks than M-Discs since October 2022 without labeling them
PSA: Verbatim no longer sells real M Discs, now puts regular BD-Rs in M Disc packagingThe M-Disc review I read didn't indicate that, but did question the real longevity of Blu-ray recordable version of M-Disc since the M-Disc specs and claims were for DVD based M-Discs.
Lastly, with phones being so cheap, we just keep taking photos all the time. Write once discs are not ideal for all backup situations. Long term archival data, fair enough, but I now have a dilemma on whether I should backup another copy on discs for old data on old discs which are over 10 years old (because most of them I have not actually use the backup even once in the past 10 years).
@ozmma: huh?
What, other than looking at the packaging and seeing "M-Disc" and "Lifetime Archival" on it?https://www.amazon.com.au/Verbatim-43823-25GB-M-Disc-BD-R/dp…
I don't know how else…. tea leaves, John Edwards?
@UFO: I read the above reddit posts about Verbatim's M-Discs. The OP there claims the discs are not real M-discs. Hence my question.
@ozmma: My link goes to products from Amazon Germany. That's where I buy my M-Discs from (when on sale). Have never had an issue with any of them being 'not real'. I stay away from pacific/asia stock for those very concerns. The box looks different to the Verbatim Europe site, and the reviews on Amazon for Japan stock aren't favourable.
Whether its all bull or not I don't know, but when there's a european retailer available why risk it?
I stay away from pacific/asia stock for those very concerns
That's the thing. There are concerns. My main reason for not going M-Discs is Verbatim optical media assets were bought by CMC Magnetics. I have bad experience with CMC recordable media. CMC also bought Taiyo Yuden recordable assets. When CMC made discs failed multiple times, it is really hard for me to regain faith in them.
The reality is EU stock won't be any different. M-Discs are not made in Europe, so they are stock from Asia as well. Last time I was in Japan, I bought some made in Japan discs. M-Discs just weren't popular there.
@ozmma: From what I read briefly, the question is basically what exactly are Bluray M-Disc recordables? The reason M-Disc support is needed for DVD M-Disc recordables are M-Discs use non-organic dye. With Blu-ray recordables (HTL ones, since they are the norm), they are non-organic as well. Furthermore, the blu-ray M-Discs seem to have the same media code as standard Verbatim / Mitsubishi media code for BD-R, so there are people indicating for blu-ray M-Discs, you don't actually need a M-Disc drive (I don't know whether that's true or not).
The bit which I am confused is that despite most standard BD-Rs use non organic dye, generally, the expected lifetime is shorter than DVD-Rs and CD-Rs. It is also the case for blu-ray M-Discs, which are quoted for 100 years. While that is much better than other storage medias, it is not in the same league as DVD M-Discs. Lastly, you still have to store M-Discs well if you want them to last long.
Also, from what I read on the quality test results for 4X M-Disc write, I can't say it is in the OMG class. It's good, but it is not record breaking (and the fact a normal BD-R beats it in some tests instils doubt in my mind). If M-Disc completely blows the BD-R in those tests, I would be quite keen, but all I see is above average burn result rather than results which BD-Rs cannot possibly achieve.
@UFO Is this a M-Disc writer as well?
Yep, burns M-Disc no issues
@UFO Stupid question but can it playback 4K UHD Blu-Ray if I want to watch a movie or is it more for ripping?
You can’t playback 4K/UHD Blu-ray Discs on a PC even if you have dedicated software like PowerDVD.
It’s a hardware limitation - Intel removed the SGX instruction set from its CPU’s (last one to have SGX was 7th gen Pentiums, I think) which was needed to playback 4K/UHD discs on PC’s.
So, either way, you’d have to rip the disc to a playable video format to be able to watch it.
Dumb I know!
I was close. The SGX extension was on Intel 8th-12th gen CPU's.
I think it was removed due to potential security issues.
It's kinda stupid that we can't play 4K discs on a PC with 4K drive and monitor.
@Graffin: Turns out you don't have to have working SGX. VLC + MakeMKV + DLLs + keyDB combined can do the playback. I tried it and it works.
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I still remember when the first CD writer/burner came out when I was in high school
2 x speed at $3k LOL