Slashdot Mirror
High Volume CD/DVD Cleaning Options?
WasteOfAmmo asks: "I help administer a small software library where users are allowed to borrow CD's for a few days to install various software packages (yes, it is all legal, futher explanation is not necessary). Obviously as the CD's are circulated more and more they become more and more scratched, 'dirty', and abused looking. Eventuallly (sometimes after 1 use) the CD's begin to have read errors. Currently once the CD's are confirmed as 'bad' they are destoryed and replaced (re-burned). This system is costly if not in material then in time. I have been searching with little or no success for a commercial or mid to high volume (5 - 20 disks per day) system for cleaning/polishing/repairing (ie: removal of small scratches) CD's. I have read all about various cleaners (including toothpaste) and kits that can be used but in all cases the procedure is time intensive, typically targeted at low volume end users, and with dubious claims of success at best. What I am looking for a system that would work similar to a video tape rewinder: you pop the CD into it, hit a button, walk away; Sometime later you come back and presto you have a freshly cleaned CD. With all the libraries, video rental, and software 'collections' out there must be a better system then 'hand washing' each CD."
I found a little device in Electronics Boutique called the 'Game Doctor'. There's a manual and electronic motorized version. Requires no special parts aside from purified water to lubricate the process, and the results are nothing short of astounding. There's some CDs I had with gouges so deep I thought for sure I'd have to replace them and the Game Dr. ressurected them.
Definately worth an investment to check out, at the very least. I haven't come across a disk it hasn't been able to save yet.
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Found the link to the manufacturer...
http://www.digitalinnovations.com
Mail: sales@digitalinnovations.com
Phone: 1-888-SMART-58
HTH. HAND.
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Why not go ask your local video mega-rental store (Blockbuster, etc.) what they do?
The NOVUS plastic polish works very well, for whe manual polishing is not a deterrent. It comes in three grades of coarseness (well, two grades plus a superficial polish). You can use it watching TV or while reading /. at work. It also does a great job on all the plexiglas that comes with all sorts of products and quickly ends up cloudy and ugly. It is actually OK to polish in a circular motion -- normally this is discouraged for fear of grinding debris into the disk.
I've tried to come up with a way of home-brew mechanizing the process, such as strapping a rag to a random-orbit sander. That worked of for all but medium-deep scratches, but wasn't much faster than doing it by hand.
And, of course, you could also threaten to penalize people for returning defective disks, which would make them more careful even if you don't enforce it (and think how nice everyone will think you are when you say, aw shucks you don't have to pay -- this time).
http://www.vcdr.com/CD%20Machine.htm
Valley Compact Disc Repair Inc. introduces the world's first and only fully automatic CD repair machine. The only machine available designed for performing CD repair as a business. The Disc-Go-Mech can repair up to 100 heavily damaged CD's per hour, unmanned!
Check out here. I've never used them and have seen these for sale at a local store (different mfg, but same principal). Should negate the scratches alltogether.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
If it is legal to "borrow" the CD to install on the computer, it ought to be legal to simply give them away. It would be less expensive for you, once you've considered the manpower costs of recataloging and inspecting, to simply mass-burn the CDs and give them out, and not have to deal with returns. You could also charge a nominal fee, say 25 cents, that would completely cover the costs of the discs and then some.
But how about a standard dishwasher connected to a large tank of cleaning fluid in a closed circuit (you can replace the cleaning fluid every few months, and add some filters at the drain to catch the worst impurities). For extra points, replace the drawers with removable CD racks, so you can simply insert a shelf of CD's at the time... Now you can probably wash tens of thousand CDs per day...
...try an industrial dishwasher!
please tell me you're kidding... hairspray is an aerosol laquer and while I've used it for everything from dulling chrome on photo-shoots to protecting pastel and soft-chalk artwork, I doubt it works very well to protect the surface of CDs.
If you have found some hairspray brand which dries with a hard enough surface to protect the clear plastic surface of the CD, is transparent enough not to cause read errors, and doesn't attract/stick dirt any worse than they already do, please let us know. Otherwise I'll keep the Aquanet in the medicine cabinet and stick to my GameDoctor and Novus thank-you-very-much....
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse
Unless of course that smell permeating from this story is BS and johnnylaw will come bangin on your door, in which case, nevermind.
He probably works in a college library at a school that has a Microsoft Campus License. Those licenses are almost always implemented by haveing the library sign out CD copies. The school I went to had this program, and the disks got trashed all the time. We probably spend a couple of hundred dollars a semester replacing the disks.
Anyway, I believe he's telling the truth about it being legit. What he's trying to do is probably a lost cause though. Best bet: Get a duplicating machine and make 50-100 copies of everything. Suck it up and waste a few hundred bucks on blanks.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I'm surprised nobody else mentioned that the Achilles' Heel of CDs are their TOP side, not the bottom.
CDs have all the data pressed or burned on a very thin layer just beneath the surface of the TOP side of the disc. Scratch that layer, you're actually scraping bytes right off the disc, permanently.
Scratches on the bottom side of the disc, a layer that includes almost the entire thickness of the disc, are minor by comparison.
DVDs are much easier to fix by polishing, because the data layer is in the exact middle of the disc -- indeed even "single-sided" DVDs are two half-thickness discs glued together. Thus the data layer is shielded from both directions, and it's much harder to permanently zarch a DVD.
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
It is the time involved with burning, lableling, filing, etc. replacement CD's that I am looking for a better solution for. So far burning replacements has been the way to go. I just figured with all the various legitimate reasons for circulating CD's and DVD's out there someone must have solved this problem already.
So far as the smell mentioned goes....have you check under your desk lately :-p
I've used these in the past to protect my cd's. you can remove them and slap on a new one when they get dirty.
I'm reasonably certain that's why the poster included that little disclaimer, and I counter that it's the accusers in this thread who are "jumping the gun", in that they don't appear to be informed about various site licensing options available to large organizations.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Someone has solved the problem already.
It's called putting the CDs on the network. With the exception of an OS that needs to boot from a CD, the installs should work fine over the network.
That's how my school did/does it, and it worked just fine. If someone can't use the network for whatever reason, you can still check out the CD -- but 0.1% as often.
...
I bought one of those fancy computers about 15 years ago. They really aren't very good, though. ;-)
No Comment.
At work we have noticed that some brands of CD-R media seem to be more resistant to damage than others. Kodak Gold, for example, has a protective coating that seems to help. Maybe you just need to use different(better) media.
(Yes, I know the submittor must have a good reason to hand out discs in physical format, but this may help.... And the subject says 'if'! :) .iso file each, then mount the files as filesystems with the '-o loop' option to the mount command. Now you can export the RAID directory via NFS, SAMBA, etc, and allow your users uberfast access to all that CD-based goodness. You can even enforce permissions at a lower directory level if you need to restrict access to certain groups.
CD Servers are incredibly expensive - espescially if you need something that serves up more than 10 or 20 discs. A good solution that I've seen work very well is to use a large, RAID-5'ed array (RAID-1 if you can afford the time to re-build the library from scratch) of 250-500GB and another SEPERATE disk for your favorite distro of Linux. (Other *NIXes should work, but I've not worked with them enough to be 100% sure.)
'dd' the cd's to a
Of course if you are not networked, this is just an exercise in futility, but it sounds cool nonetheless!
I worked at the CD rental organisation in Enschede, the Netherlands for a few years. People can borrow CD's there, and also DVDs and CD-ROMs. We have a system where we keep track of the scratches and dirt on CD's. Every CD has a 'scratch card' on which the scratches are indicated using special markers with colors you can't buy in the store. In this way, the person that last borrowed the CD can be held responsible for new scratches. If the scratches are bad he/she is fined. If they destroy a CD totally they are fined for the costs of a new copy (we can bay them cheaper than normal consumers because we buy them from the import directly). This system works quite well, provided that you inform new users about it first. For more info see www.cd-uitleen.nl (all in Dutch I'm afraid).
-- Cheers!
Whether this is being done here in the U. S. of A, or in central Africa, there are costs involved. If you want to lend out CDs, over and over, clean them, polish them, sort them back into their bins and lend them out again, you're using up valuable materials and wasting the time of a trained professional who could be more productive elsewhere. Burning single replacements also takes more time per disc than burning a stack. Given the cost of individual discs nowadays it will still be less expensive to just give them out. If the people in that area can't afford a quarter per disc, then give them away for free; it's still less expensive than this lending scheme.