Verbatim 43823 25GB 4x M-Disc BD-R - 5 Pack Jewel Case

I bought these to backup the data I cannot afford to lose in a virus, malware or ransomware attack. Bought from Amazon EU, and each disc is shrink wrapped and all barcodes match Verbatim's website. I saw concerns about scratches in the inner ring and burn failures so I was concerned given the price. While the scratches are definitely there, they're in the inner ring where the 3 serial numbers (1 per layer) are, so nothing is written there and they don't impact quality. The discs are identified as MID: VERBAT-IMk-000, which verifies on the BluRay site as HTL (High-to-low Inorganic) BDR V3.0. Burned with a Pioneer BDR-XD05T drive from Aug 2014 (which has no claim to support MDisc on it, but works because MDisc adheres to all BluRay standards). Used ImgBurn (from a mirror site to avoid the Adware from the genuine site) and created a 100GB ISO Image (Mode1/2048 using ISO9660+Joliet+UDF with UDF 1.50). My first disc image contained 25,180 files in 595 folders totalling 92,368,211,531 bytes. I also MD5 summed each file and saved the checksums to the BD as well. It took 26 minutes to create the image on the local disc, then I burned at 2x speed for safety which took 2 hours 55 minutes, then 1hr 31 minutes to verify the disc to the ISO. I also verified all MD5sums after the disc had cooled off which tool another 2 hours 32 minutes. Both the ImgBurn and the MD5Sum file verifications were good. The discs show up as 90.2GB in Windows, but that is because of the difference in units i.e. GB vs GiB. In short, I am happy that these Discs are as described and when burned at 2x speed, have no failures. I would say ignore the "you don't get 100GB", the "scratches on the inner ring" and "burn failure" reviews on here. My opinion is that those reviews come from misunderstandings about the tech and probably burning directly without using ISO first. I will be buying more of these again. As to whether they last longer than standard BD-XL or whether I should be using single layer 25GB MDiscs, only time will tell. I'll probably check the MD5 sums once evert couple of years to ensure the backups are still valid and take more/move files to a new disc if there are issues.

Works nicely with my internal Pioneer BDR-213EBK and Brun Aware software on Windows 11. It takes my PC about 3 hours to right a disk full and the same again to verify. I have written to 10 disks so far with out a single failure and it is nice knowing I have the surety of not losing precious digital pictures, music and hobby info

You can fit 45min+ of FM RF captures of VHS (16msps 8-bit FLAC) or a full MiniDV tape on a single 25GB disc, its only a shame 128GB discs are only made by Sony but never got the M-Disc adaption. All modern BD worm disc media is long life reliable (HLT discs) but M-Disc's molding is what makes it really stand out, though some will argue glossy carbon is a more reliable substraight, your paying for the better grade plastics and better grade meterial. ISO/IEC 10995:2011 & ECMA-379 - are the standards it confroms to if you want a fun read. At the end of the day, we all will most likely be long dead before these discs degrade, unless they are in a house fire not much can break the encasing polycarb plastics, these are perfect to backup your factory stamped DVD/BD discs and or anything else for long term archival at room tempratures.

all ok

These are expensive to buy, but if you want an offline copy of important data (financial record, children pictures/videos etc etc), this is pretty much the only consumer level device to do this. Optical media has also had a good history of backward compatibility spanning many decades. The claimed life of many hundreds of years is, of course, going to be hard to prove, but nothing else claims this longevity. The Blu-Ray's can be written with any Blu-Ray writer, but I have always used one with MDISC branding (which is technically only needed for MDISC DVDs). The key thing is they can be read by ANY drive and written with standard software.

Worked great in my Asus blu-ray disk writer. They are in a standard CD case with a printable and writeable disk label. I used Sharpie permanent marker to write on mine. They are reported to have a 1000 year life but someone else will have to report back in that feature!

Writing to these disks was simple, will be waiting a while to work out what their performance is like. Hoping they perform better than some standard disks which have degraded over the years. These are very expensive but there's probably not much demand for this niche item.

These seem to work fine, though I've only one blu-ray drive to test them with, so I only know that they'll read without problems in the same drive that wrote to them... Sha256 sums on files before packing in to an iso and then after reading from the burned disc are identical. And burning from Linux is pretty easy using k3b (create a <25GB iso image file of your files first, then burn that iso using the growisofs option, set k3b NOT to auto-eject discs upon completion and to show advanced GUI settings) and a Hitachi-LG burner drive. But I'm not 100% sure if these are really truly M-discs. They are branded as M-discs, but with the exception of the branding printed on the top side they are visually identical to standard 25GB BD-R blu-ray discs from Verbatim. Same colour, same "barcode" near the inner edge... K3b also reports identical media information for these as it does for standard BD-R discs, and although in practice k3b tends to burn all discs at about 1x speed, it detects these discs as being capable for 2x, 4x and 6x burning, just like normal BD-R discs, even though in theory M-discs have a max speed of 4x. There were some reports in 2022 that verbatim had changed production of their 25GB M-diss to be more similar to their standard blu-ray discs, maybe blu-ray and M-disc are the same now and verbatim does a "binning" operation where most discs from one production line get sold as blu-ray, whereas those which pass a large battery of quality tests get labelled as M-disc before leaving the factory. True M-discs, the 4.7GB sort aren't made anywhere, at all, any more as far as I can tell, and 4.7GB is inconveniently small, 25GB discs for backing up the most important data makes sense, 4.7GB discs force one to start doing inconvenient splitting of big 7z files so they can be placed across multiple discs. These 25Gb blu-ray M-discs are supposed to have reasonably similar lifespans, but I can't be sure whether they're really any different than verbatim's standard BD-R (metal ablative type) blu-ray discs. There's a lot of speculation online both ways, and it is hard to be sure of the situation. To be quite clear, these discs work absolutely fine, on that regard I can give 5 stars, but I don't know whether they'll actually be more durable than the standard BD-R discs, hence the lowered rating given my fears they might just be regular blu-ray's selected by post-production quality testing. If anyone can enlighten me I would really like to know about that. Thanks

Mettent un temps fou poyr être gravés quand ça marche...

Helt OK!

Questi dischi vergini blu-ray single layer Verbatim M-disc da 25GB dovrebbero essere i migliori che ci siano in commercio come supporti ottici BD-R. Il layer su quale è bruciata l'informazione, in conformità con i reclami del produttore, è fatto di un materiale "carbonio vitreo" con altissima resistenza all'ossidazione ed elevate temperature e con "durata di vita" di parecchie centinaia di anni (come se fossero "scolpiti in pietra"). Queste affermazioni pare che siano appoggiate anche dai test fatti dal Dipartimento della difesa degli USA, al meno per quanto riguarda i DVD M-Disc su quali sono stati effettuati dei test accelerati di degrado. Come si vede dal cofanetto, sono fatti in Taiwan ed ho provato a far identificare il produttore con il software DVD Identifier, ma sembra che la base dati del programmino non è più aggiornato e non riesce fornire questa informazione. Comunque dal Media Manufacturer ID: MILLEN-MR1, dovrebbe essere l'azienda che ha inventato questo tipo di layer, quindi la Millenniata Inc. Sul lato che riporta i spunti con le comparazioni tra questo disco ed il normale BD-R, la prima voce "Burn and read with all BD drives" può essere fuorviante se non si tiene conto del titolo-consiglio: "ENGRAVE WITH M-Disc READY DRIVES". In fatti questi dischi NON possono essere masterizzati dai masterizzatori che non sono capaci di scrivere M-Disc, perché la masterizzazione di questi dischi (a punto per il materiale speciale di qui sono fatti) ha bisogno di un raggio LASER di scrittura più potente, che non tutti i masterizzatori (specialmente quelli più vecchi) la implementano. Quindi "burn" solo con masterizzatori capaci di scrivere gli M-Disc e "read with all BD drives", cioè leggibili (in teoria) con tutti i lettori/masterizzatori blu-ray normali. Steso discorso per la descrizione sul retro del pacchetto: "Compatibile con tutti i registratori e masterizzatori BD" ... NO! Sono compatibili ma solo in lettura! Da verificare sul sito Verbatim la compatibilità della scrittura. Ogni disco ha la sua custodia standard (non slim) e può essere stampato con stampanti a getto d'inchiostro. La capacità di questi dischi blu-ray single layer è di 25GB, ma attenzione, sono espressi in multipli di 10 non di 2, quindi la capacità effettiva è di 25,025,314,816 Byte che equivale a 23.307 GiB (GibiByte, cioè i GigaByte multipli di 2, quello che di fatto fanno vedere i diversi sistemi operativi). Il layer, come si vede anche dall'immagine allegata è di colore grigio-marrone scuro. Per adesso ho masterizzato solo 1 disco con la velocità 2x, utilizzando il masterizzatore interno Pioneer BDR-212EBK che è capace di masterizzare gli M-Disc, ed è andato tutto liscio. La velocità massima di scrittura è di 4x come rilevato anche dai diversi software utilizzati per ricavare le informazioni sul supporto ottico. Il software di masterizzazione non dovrebbe incidere sul fatto che il disco è un M-Disc, importante è il masterizzatore, comunque prima di masterizzare meglio verificare questa cosa. Io ho utilizzato ImgBurn versione 2.5.8.0 che non è stato più aggiornato dal 2013. Dopo la masterizzazione ho rimesso il disco nell'altro masterizzatore, marchio LG (che non è capace di masterizzare gli M-Disc) e non ci sono stati problemi di lettura. Raccomandavo i Verbatim BD-R DL 50GB a chi cerca qualità a livelli di standard industriale, quindi questi dischi che in teoria sono il top dei top, li raccomanderei ancora di più, sperando pure io nello stesso tempo che dureranno al lungo così come è pubblicizzato dal produttore, ed i miei pro-pro-pronipoti riusciranno a vedere le preziose foto e video salvate, se esisteranno ancora lettori di questi supporti di archiviazione dati. Il prezzo è elevato, probabilmente uno dei più elevati per il costo di GigaBytes/Euro tra tutti supporti di archiviazioni dati, ma se dureranno come promesso, forse vale la pena.

I started using my recorded and these discs today. So far, I burned two out of five and I've experienced no errors. Take in count that write speed is 4x. I believe there are other discs, more expensive, that are to be written at 6x. At 4x it writes at 18 MB/sec (like a typical USB pen drive for me) and it takes nearly two hours to burn a 90 GB blu-ray, plus an additional hour and half to verify the data written. Worth mentioning that I was able to burn 90 GB only. Nero didn't allow me to write more than 90 GB.

Perfect quality, will ask my family after 100 years if they still can open the pictures on the discs