Digital preservation in M-Disk: is DVD burner compatible?

Question

I'm planning for the future of my data, and would like to archive a copy or two in M-Disk (among others). Media is so cheap that having 4-5 copies of them is no big deal. Anyway, I wonder whether my DVD burner is compatible with the M-disks.

The output of

dmesg | egrep -i --color 'cdrom|dvd|cd/rw|writer'

is

[    1.635953] ata2.00: ATAPI: HL-DT-STDVDRAM GT32N, AS01, max UDMA/100
[    1.724663] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GT32N     AS01 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[    1.752683] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
[    1.752686] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20

Answer 1

I don't think it's possible to say with absolute certainty based on the information you provided, but it is highly unlikely that your drive will write an m-disk. It would appear your drive was made by Hitachi (possibly rebranded) and is fairly generic.

Most M-Disk writers will proclaim this ability on the front of the drive.