Review on Verbatim 98913 M-Disc BDXL 100GB 4X with Branded Surface – (5-pack) Jewel Cases, Blue by Lawrence Reuter

Well, my goal. I have about 90 gigabytes of data (like Word, Excel, PDF, etc.) for my business that I wanted to back up onto a single drive and then store the drive off-site in case of a fire. I wanted to be able to put a disc in any computer and read the files without having to download disc reading software. I have a thin LG BD-RE BU20N drive on a HP i7 sff desktop. I also wanted the drive to be persistent, meaning you can't change it once it's burned. I put all my files in one directory on my computer which has an SSD for storage. I then put the disc in the drive (Windows 10 OS) and chose "With CD/DVD player" (mastered) instead of "As from USB drive", which allows you to make changes after the files have been written. Then I copied all the files to the hard drive. Several names had to be corrected because they were not compatible with the CD burning standard. After about 10 minutes I was ready to hit the record button. I clicked on it and after about 5 seconds I get an error message that it doesn't work and the drive is probably unusable. Stand for $17. I've been burning discs since the original single layer CD media came out and back then we made a lot of underutilized buffers etc. So the first thing I did was check my drive's firmware. It was 1.00 but there was never a newer firmware. I also had 25GB Verbatum M discs so I split my 90GB into 4 pieces of 25GB and those 4 discs recorded great. I thought maybe it was a drive they no longer make in this model. LG and Pioneer seem to be the two types of drives you can get, so I ordered an ASUS full-height external drive that features the Pioneer mechanism. Tried to light this disc. A $17 roller coaster in 5 seconds. The Asus drive came with software, so I downloaded that software. Now this software created its own proprietary 90GB which means I have to use this software to read the disc, but at this point I wanted to see if I could write something on a 100GB drive. After about 30 minutes of file processing and about 10 minutes of actual recording time. Another booth for $17. Now I only have one hard drive. I found out what the hell. I put it in and this time selected "Like USB Drive". He prepared the CD. I then started copying the files onto the drive and after about 6 hours I had a fully loaded drive. I was then able to read that disc on any computer running Windows XP or newer. The only downside is that the hard drive can be changed. Someone could have deleted all the files. Of course it's a BD-R so you don't get the space back and technically all the files are still there, only the FAT table has changed, but it's still annoying. For now I can live with the Life File System hard drive version. I was able to add files to the disc using either a LG BD-RE BU20N drive or an external Asus BW-16D1X-U 16x Blu-ray drive, so both drives work with this media. So if you do what I did, choose "Like USB drive" instead of "With CD/DVD player" and you'll probably be successful too.