Verbatim M DISC BDXL 100GB 6X with Branded Surface Blank Blu-Ray Recordable Media – 5pk Jewel Case Box

So my goal. I have about 90 gigs of data (files like word, excel, pdf etc) for my business that I wanted to backup to a single disc and then store the disc offsite in case of fire. I wanted to be able to stick the disc into any computer and read the files with out having to load software to read the disc. I have the LG BD-RE BU20N slim drive in my HP i7 sff desktop. I also wanted the disc to be permanent meaning you couldn't change it after it was burnt. I put all my files into a single directory on my pc which has an SSD for storage. I then put the disc in the drive (Windows 10 OS) and chose "With a CD/DVD player" (Mastered) as opposed to "Like a USB Drive" which allows changes after the files are burnt. I then copied all the files onto the disc. It had to fix a few names because they weren't compatible with the CD burning standard. After about 10 mins I was ready to click the burn button. I clicked it and after about 5 seconds I get an error saying it didn't work and the disc is probably not usable. $17 coaster. Now I have been burning discs since the original single layer CD media came out and back then we made a lot of coasters with buffer under-runs etc. So the first thing I did was check the firmware of my drive. It was 1.00 but there has never been any newer firmware. I happened to have 25gb Verbatum M-Discs also so I broke my 90 gb into 4 25gb chunks and those 4 discs burnt just fine. So I went back and tried it again.....5 seconds another $17 coaster. I figured maybe it was the drive which they don't make this model anymore. LG and Pioneer seem to be the two types of drives you can get so I ordered a full height ASUS external drive which has the Pioneer mechanism in it. Tried to burn with that drive...5 seconds later $17 coaster. The Asus drive came with software so I loaded that software. Now that software made it's own proprietary 90gb which means I would have to use that software to read the disc but at this point I wanted to see if I could get anything burnt on a 100gb drive. After about 30 mins of processing the file and about 10 mins of actual write time...another $17 coaster. Now I only had one disc left at this point. I figured what the heck. I put it in and this time I chose "Like a USB Drive". It prepped the disc. I then started to copy files to the disc and about 6 hours later I had a fully loaded disc. I could then read that disc in any computer that is Windows XP or newer. Only downside is you can change the disc. Someone could delete all the files. Ofcourse this is BD-R so you don't get the space back and technically all the files are still there just the FAT table has been modified but still it's annoying. For now I can live with the Life File System version of the disc. I was able to add files to the disc using either the LG BD-RE BU20N drive or the Asus BW-16D1X-U 16x External Blu-ray so both drives will work with this media. So if your doing what I was doing....choose "Like a USB Drive" not "With a CD/DVD player" and you will probably be successful also.

The Verbatim BDXL Branded Surface 100Gb M-disc BD-R (write once) discs are excellent. The cost per gigabyte as of right now hovers around $0.11 to $0.12 per gigabyte no matter the disc capacity size you choose, so going bigger is just easier and less time. These are great for archiving and backups, true backups, as in a medium that will survive time and survive disasters if housed in a good safe place. If you're looking for affordable optical media with higher capacity, this is the way to go. M-disc will survive a lot more than a standard BD-R disc will. That extra heartiness will cost you 3 times the price, but at $11 per disc, it's worth it. I've attached images of the disc(s) themselves and the output from ImgBurn where I just burned a 95Gb data set onto a 100Gb disc without any issues at all at 4x speed. I used a LG WH16NS40 optical drive ($65). It worked flawless with these Vertabim discs. I used ImgBurn 2.5.8.0 in Win7 64bit. I didn't have to do anything, no firmware update, no drivers, no nothing. The drive read the blank BDXL 100Gb discs natively and the drive wrote the data perfectly. It was completely verified after the write. It's a perfect 1:1 copy.

These M-Disc Verbatim branded DVDs are the only ones to go with your archival projects - very pleased with the outcomes.

As overall, the disks are good. The only reason i put 4 star is because disk size is actually 90GB, not 100GB. Unfortunately, I've screwed my first disk, because on macOS - you can't see the real disk size, so when I tried to burn about 99GB on it - it failed miserably at the end. Then decided to check on Windows and there you can see that the real disk size is about 90GB.

I mean seriously... It is. Because think about it. You can have tape, you can have Hard Drive, SSD, or even some Crystal. But with all those choices, this makes the most sense. Tape: You have a shelf life of around 25 years and the LTO format or anything that is based on tape means you need to have a tape machine that can load and write on it. Those cost Thousands of dollars to purchase but on the other side, its cheap tape. But in 25 years, try finding a tape machine that you can have at the ready when you're ready to review your old tapes. Take your VHS player, for example. Hard Drives & SSD's are great. They're cheap for what they are but they even have a even shorter lifespan than tape and when those go, you can't get them fixed cheaply and in some cases at all. You'd be fighting a losing battle in 10 years. M-Disc - carves your data in to Rock. Has a shelf life of over 100 years and not only that, can be thrown in water and still work. Finding or sourcing a Optical Drive, is painless even in the future they'll still be around much more cheaply or more consistently than an LTO drive. You can score 100GB for $20 which may sound like a lot. But given the simplicity of it being more future-proof than the latter and also more durable than magnetic storage, thats a small price to pay. Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk.

Edit 7: Even the pack from I gt from another place had size problem I now know it is the companies disk the size won't burn between 62-65gb, these disks are no longer advertised properly so if you are after 100gb you should look elsewhere or expect to buy many more due to the low size it can burn, Is this even legal at this point I really don't know but yeah the size is not even close to accurate. Edit 6: From 2 stars to 1 star and a 0 if I could as my latest 5 pack 2 disks so far have not been able to hold more than about 62gb and between 62gb-65gb they fail to complete backup of my data, this isn't the first time this has happened but I can tell they have completely gone to this size with all their batches now as even the singles I bought just recently had the same problem and I am not able to get anywhere close to 500gb I mean what is 62x5 not very much I believe it is 300 something and I have no doubt in my mind the next 3 will be the same, so anyhow I have like no desire to buy this anymore and am going to just stick with buying microsd cards and hdd drives for the future for preservation because this is a joke and I can't even tell if these disks are real m-disks or not so who knows if they end up failing for long term storage plus M disk 100gb drives that actually work for these there is less brand names available than like 2-4 years ago as most are out of stock and aren't returning back to stock such as my M-disk vertamin that has the high quality drive that they changed to a lower quality drive now I heard and the other name brand ones are selling worse quality drives as well I heard from reviews and word of mouth. I don't exist to buy low quality stuff and when quality gets bad I move onto something else and don't put up with this. Edit5: On edit 3 below I noticed the space problems I was having was due to to using a compression tool which the space smaller on drives but not on the disk, ai figured it would carry over with that same space to the m disk but it didn't so long story short I was wrong these disks do hold about 92gb of stuff as I tried it again without compression and the space on each disk since has been able to hold about 92gb-93gb of stuff. This right now is worth it as hdd and ssd and micro sd cards and so forth are going up in price so right now I would say buying a bdxl m disk blue ray external drive is worth it especially knowing these disks will last hundreds upon hundreds of years. By the way the disks are still the same since I started buying them which was what over a year ago now if I am not mistaken so yeah you can still crack it with a hammer and it will still work as long as you don't split it anywhere, the disk is amazing and all of my disks still work and can copy data on it to my computer anytime I need to such as if I forgot I deleted something off my hdd and programs that find data don't find it or if the hdd ssd or so forth got corrupted well this is your solution as it is a write once disk and it also is impossible for it to become corrupted so whatever is on the disk is put onto this stone disk and locked in time until you access it, m disks are truly amazing I gotta admit :). Edit 4: Now for only 1 disk it is not worth what they are asking, better look elsewhere Edit 3: The latest disks now struggle to copy around 74gb of data. I no longer recommend this Edit 2: these only allow around 92gb of space I haven't figured out the exact amount but have kept it under 94gb on each disk and it gives the okay on the space left but trying to do around 94-95 or so gb says not enough space, this is a very minor letdown but I figured I would mention it so future buyers would know. I will be taking away 1 star now because the ones I bought the very first time allowed me to copy 100gb of data so the company must have reduced the size on the discs sadly as that is all I can come to the conclusion of plus they still advertise them as 100gb and yet they are not but thankfully I probably won't ever need more of these after the ones I just ordered so it won't be a problem in my future. Edit 1: Forgot to mention I used it on Windows 11 with Verbatim drive and Ashampoo Burning Studio 26 with no problems, newer version will work to such as the newest 27 version (burned more than 8 discs so far with zero failures). Just make sure it is a drive that supports bdxl m disks and bdxl is only for 100gb disks, any lower such as 50gb are bd-r so as long as the drive says bdxl m disk support you are good, took me awhile of researching to wrap my head around this so this another thing I wanted to help future people out with :). Old: Still works even if you use a flat head screw driver and use the corner pointy edge and shred the disk, I tested it on one to see how strong these things are so I can have proof that they truly are legit and sure enough they are :). Every single disk has been error free and flawless btw.

I bought a five pack of these on Amazon listed as "USED LIKE NEW" at a slightly discounted price. One of the disks had a deep gouge on the write surface near the center, possibly a factory defect. I didn't realize this at first when I loaded it into the blu-ray writer -- a PIONEER BDR-2212 BD/DVD/CD internal drive. Thankfully, I didn't damage the drive as a result! The disk being unusable, I threw it away. I could have returned the entire pack for a refund but I wanted to test the remaining disks, and my actual losses only amounted to a few dollars anyway. The remaining four disk were free of defects and burned without error. Just to be sure, I verified the contents of each disk on a separate blu-ray drive using the "fc" command under the Windows Command Prompt, comparing the contents of the burned disk with the original files on the hard drive. No differences were encountered. Despite receiving a defective disk, I would still rank these disks as being very high quality. I plan to buy a larger pack in the future to see if they work as well as these.

Right now it's 5 stars since the data seems to have not deteriorated - yet. If for some reason it should fail withing the next couple of hundred years, my 5 star rating will be downgraded. Stay tuned.