New 1,000-Year DVD Disc Writes Data in Stone, Literally
Millenniata, a new optical disc company, has designed an optical disc that the company said will last virtually forever.
The company has designed what it calls the M-Disc, a disc that uses a rock-like layer of material to write and read data from, rather than the ink dies that a conventional optical disc uses.
Millenniata said that it has partnered with Hitachi-LG Data Storage on both aftermarket and OEM DVD drives, both for external and internal PC use. Hitachi-LG has made an undisclosed investment into Millenniata, and the two companies will move forward to license the technology to other manufacturers, the companies said. Entourage dvd boxset


Millenniata is overseeing the manufacturing of its own discs, a process that is just ramping up, chief executive Scott Shumway said. Millenniata will price the discs at about $3 apiece, on par with the golden archival DVDs that are already on the market. Several are those are rated at 100 years; Millenniata claims its discs will last for 1,000 years, based on its own tests.
How it works
Conventional recordable optical discs use an dye, sandwiched between layers of plastic substrate held together by some form of adhesive. "Burning" the disc changes the optical properties of the dye, so that they mimic the bumps and pits in a read-only version of the disc, such as a DVD-ROM.
Over time, numerous things can degrade a disc: humidity can seep between the layers, or sunlight can degrade the dye. The adhesive can also disintegrate, allowing the disc to fall apart. In almost all cases, this won't happen for a number of years; however, if a user doesn't burn a backup or a new disc, data can be lost.
Entourage box set 1-7

"What we have, for the first time, is the ability to store data permanently," Shumway said.
Instead of using an optical dye, the Millenniata M-Disc literally etches data in stone, or at least a rock-like material. That material, of course, is Millenniata's secret sauce. However, the company descries it as being made up of inorganic materials and compounds including metals and metalloids, and contains several of the materials and compounds common to rocks including silicon dioxide and carbon. It's also stable to 500 degrees Centigrade, Millenniata said, and is also stable in the presence of oxygen, nitrogen, and water - important for surviving both fire, and floods.
When an M-Disc is "burned," the rock-like material literally melts away, exposing a pit or a hole that can be read as a data bit. The technology doesn't require a special laser, but it does require a bit more power, plus some tuning in the firmware, said Ted Ha, the team leader of H-L's overseas sales and marketing division.
A 2009 report prepared by the U.S. Navy's Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division put several archival discs to stress tests involving light, heat, and humidity, and found that only the Millenniata discs came out unscathed.
Entourage 1-7 dvds

Now, Hitachi-LG is moving forward to sell drives to consumers and resellers that can take advantage of the technology. While consumers may wish to store pictures and important documents on them, Hitachi-LG plans to incorporate it into its archival systems to replace tape, Ha said.
The discs will be part of LG's SuperMulti Blue line, Ha said. Millenniata discs are, at present, only manufactured in a form that's compatible with a 4.7-Gbyte single-layer DVD disc; Blu-ray discs are on the roadmap, Shumway said. In addition, they can only be burned at 4X speeds. Drive prices aren't currently available, Ha said.
Why not use cloud services to store data? "Cloud's strength is that it's easy to use," Shumway said. "But consumers need to pay for the capacity."