There's certainly some evidence that MD is more stable than CD as a long term storage medium, but it's also true that recorders and players are getting harder to find.

CD and DVD will be around for a lot longer. When they become obsolescent, there will a replacement and the best thing to do is transfer all your data to that. At least while it's digital there will be no loss of information.

I've only recently discovered the joys of DVD-R. Drives are cheap, so are the blank discs, and both have reached the point where they are as easy to use as CDR. I have a drive that can use all DVD and CD media types and detects the media and recommended writing speed.

Black Hawk: there WAS a minidisc drive for the PC, made by Sony, but it was so slow and expensive that it didn't sell. Also it didn't give you access to the content of audio MD's. It would play them, but if you wanted the computer to read and write files you had to use data MD media. Sony cocked up MD in many ways by making it too restrictive, always for purely commercial, not technical reasons. I loved it and used it when it had developed to good audio quality (I still have my MZ-R30) but it's been overtaken on all fronts by CDR and flash memory now.

Anahata