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Say Goodbye To Your CD-Rs In Two Years?
Little Hamster writes "According to an article on cdfreaks.com, a test done by the Dutch PC-Active magazine showed that among 30 different CD-R brands tested, a lot of them were already unreadable after twenty months. This is shocking, and makes me wonder how should I backup my data, photo and music collection."
You can buy special transparant stickers for that. They cover almost the whole CD. You need a tool to stick them on properly. See here.
-- Cheers!
If you're on the Mac, the Finder's built-in burn verifies, as does Disk Copy, though, to the best of my knowledge, iTunes does not, but it will terminate on a bad burn and let you know about it. Roxio Toast also verifies.
Option-Shift-K.
Too bad they didn't give a list of brands and manufacturers; that would've been good to know.
... the Mitsuis at up to $5+ per disk at times). Unfortunately I
believe they dropped off the CDR market since I can't seem to get a hold of any
of theirs, save some which is rebranded under a different name... which you
really can't find out until you pop it into the CDR drive to ID it.
I believe Taiyo Yuden made a well-stabilized cyanine die that was supposed to
last long as well.
I can't say much about the stability of the pthalocyanine dyes today, especially
all those coming from the cheaper manufacturers (Ritek, Prodisc, etc). It
doesn't seem like you can even find gold pthalocyanines anymore these days, or
heck, even gold cyanines. I don't know much about the azo dyes though.
Back when you could still get them, I burned all my important data onto Mitsui golds. They seem to be working still, after sitting around for 5-6 years. Similarly with the Mitsui silvers and Kodak silvers. All these used a pthalocyanine dye, which is supposed to be more stable than the cyanine (and cost more
Which brands are good today? That's rather hard to tell, since even within a single brand you're probably going to find a bunch of different manufacturers, unless you're buying one where the brand is the same as the manufacturer. I've seen tons of different manufactured Sonys; Taiyo Yuden's and Mitsui's showing up as Memorex's (very rare, most of the current ones are Prodisc I think and I've seen a lot of Riteks in the past). 'Made in Japan' seems to be a good sign though, instead of 'Made in Taiwan'.
Personally, I save the cheapo ones for throw-aways. Burn to listen in my car for a while, to mix and match and avoid wear and tear on originals. Scratching them up really doesn't matter, they're not that critical. Anything important I try to keep on (supposedly) more long-lasting media, and that gets handled with care. So far, 5+ year backups have been brought back up and data read without any problems. Whether that'll be true of the more current disks in another 5 years I really can't say.
-- Silhouette
Although they are of a similar tech, what about DVD recordable disks? I've got plenty of those now...
This would be as good a place as any to mention TDK's Armor Plated DVD Media, which are supposed to keep on working even after having been scoured with steel wool pads. Also, Verbatim makes a line of scratch-resistant CD-R media.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
CDRs are much more reliable than hard drives. Each hard drive has a high probability of failing in the first two years. That's likely why the warranty on new drives was recently reduced to 12 months. CDRs, if they are high quality and are properly stored, can last many years.
This Site has been kicked around slashdot lots of times and depicts a man, a dremel, a CD and 30,000 RPM's of angular velocity.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The drives we use to backup our systems write at a sustained rate of 30-40Mb/second each. The fast drives are expensive though.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
However, others have noted that real-life disks can have a much shorter life.
Normally I'd reckon that off-brand disks come off the same production lines as name brands, but Maxell currently has a campaign to warn people that some white disks are digitally marked as Maxell, which can lead to a recorder treating a disk as a 4X when it's actually a 1X. So perhaps one should stick with branded products for archival purposes.
TDK claims to be using a more stable cyanine dye now, which should translate to increased storage life.
As a rule of thumb, disks recordable at higher speeds should have a longer storage life than those limited to 1X, since improvement in dye stability is directly responsible for the increased recording speeds.
According to this CD-Recordable FAQ entry , "it depends".
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I used to work in a CD factory (from 1986 to 1994), and this is plain not true. A pressed CD consists of:
disc label
protective coating (laquer)
Aluminum layer (sputtered on)
data layer (pressed into the next layer when injection molded)
polycarbonate injection molded disc
To vary from this is a violation of the Phillips spec, and you are not allowed to put the Compact Disc logo on the resulting product.
What you probably noticed was the laquer layer was thick when we started making discs, but over the years laquer has improved to the point that only a very thin layer is needed.
If you leave out the laquer entirely, the aluminum oxidates rapidly, rendering the disc useless.
According to this site that was linked to from Fujitsu's site magneto optical drives are nearly indestructable, they have a minimum life of 30 years (good enough for me) they don't lose their magentic properties until they reach 180C so you can spill as much coffee on them that you want. =P
The drives can be had for roughly $257 for internal IDE. I didn't shop around hard, but you can get a 5pack of 1.3GB disks for $95 that's about $0.014/MB, not too shabby. They also make high end solutions with 9.1GB disks but the drives are remarkably expensive. If I were more serious about doing backups, magneto optical would be the way to go.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
Long story short the rule of thumb was like this: Green CDs have a life of ~5 hours. Yellow CDs ~20 hours. The DARK DARK Blue cd's (not light blue, the only brand I know of like this is Verbatim) *600* hours.
The price increases correspondingly as well. I found the best solution was to use blue's for backups and critical things, and regular commodity cd-r's stuff for day to day things.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
The machine is usually a Sony CD-RW CRX145E, recording at 10X and re-writing at 4X. I have faster burners on other machines, but those are newer, so I can't yet vouch for their quality.
"Brands most often recommended: Mitsui, Kodak, Taiyo Yuden, and TDK. Sometimes Pioneer and Ricoh. It appears that HP, Philips, Sony, Yamaha, and Fuji use these manufacturers for most of their disks. (Kodak no longer manufactures media.) Brands that are often trashed: Maxell, Verbatim, Memorex, Ritek, Hotan, Princo, Gigastorage, Lead Data, Fornet, CMC Magnetics. Many "no-name" bulk CD-Rs are one of these brands. Sometimes a particular line of discs from a particular manufacturer or reseller will be better than others from the same company. For example, Verbatim DataLifePlus discs are recognized as pretty good, but Verbatim ValuLife are seen as being of much lower quality. "
Important details are found in the full article:
http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq07.html#S7-4-1
Or any of the other dozen companies doing this that have folded in the past 2 years.
I've always wondered if this [burning at 1x speed results in better CD's] is actually true or not.. I have yet to see any actual evidence to back up this claim...
Well, head on over to cdfreaks.com website and take a look at the results of some tests. For the lazy among us, burning at 4x resulted in more C1 errors in every test posted (on page 1, page 2 timed out) than burning at a higher speed (usually 40x, but one test was at 52x). A comment on page 2 indicated on person did 4 tests, and half said burn at high speeds and half said burn at lower speeds. Overall, the small sample of results indicated that burning at low speed usually makes things worse, not better. Surprising huh?
I remember way back when, around when CD-R's first came out, they had a type of organic dye that appeared gold whos purpose was for data archival. I have a few of these and quite a few of the old blue Verbatims and some no-name green media. All of these are still quite readable, and they were burned in 1996. Perhaps one of the reseachers in the article left their CD-R's on the dashboard of their car and didn't own up to it.
. shtml
The other thing to consider is that DVD-R/+R technology is dropping though the floor. I bought a Pioneer A05 for $320 in January and today the A06 is going for $229., and remember I bought this thing from the same place I linked to. I don't know how DVD-R is for archival, but my point is that at the rate the technology is falling in price, CD-R may not be around much longer anyway.
In any case, I found a rather excellent guide on the different tyes of CD-R media. It goes over all the dyes, their manufacturers, theoretical lifespans of the dyes, etc. I recommend a visit...
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_dye
-R
X-CDRoast does verifies.
Does it matter? Yes. Is slower always better? No.
Rather than re-hash this, please see:
In the CD-Recordable FAQ.Quick summary: higher speeds require a different "write strategy" than slower speeds. Different media formulations are optimized for a particular write strategy, so writing slower than the optimal speed can actually produce inferior results.
The choice of media and recording hardware has to be taken into consideration. In any event, this has relatively little to do with disc deterioration. A disc that's better to begin with won't show the effects of physical deterioration as soon, but if the top lacquer coat isn't as close to air-tight as materials allow, it doesn't matter how you write the disc.
CD-RWs are extremely photosensitive.
The biggest benefit is that it cuts WAY down on the number of +5 posts, so you can get straight to the key comments if that's all you want. It's cool when the home page says "24 of 215 comments" but when you click in the Funny modifier filters half of them out and you end up only having to plow through 12 :)
One simple rule for its versus it's
Same here. I've got disks from when I got my first CDR. Was just using one the other day. My guess is the failures are if you use unbranded disks on an unbranded drive. I had one CDR drive that was AWFUL. You'd burn a disk, eject, put it back, and it would think it was an audio CD. Terrible drive. Disks burnt on that drive are EXTREMELY flaky.
Actually, thinking about it, I do have a couple of disks that are tough to read, but the fact is they've been like that from day one.
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MAM-E Gold Ultra, about Eur. 1.15 each.
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Mitsui Gold Ultra, about $1.60 each.
Kodak used to be in this market, but seems to have exited it.The key here seems to be dye type. Phthalocyanine has slower writing speeds but longer storage life; Cyanine has higher writing speeds but much shorter storage life. The "archival grade" CDs also have gold reflecting layers and a tougher substrate.
There are also "Medical grade" CD-R blanks, but they're essentially the same as the archival ones.
There are programs which will read the ATIP information from a blank, telling you what the manufacturer, max writing speed, and dye type is.
Mitsui is currently the only company making archival quality CD-R media with a phthalocyanine dye layer and a gold reflective layer.
All archival quality CD-R's use phthalocyanine, it is the only stabilized dye known to last more than 100 years. Gold is the absolute best reflective layer available because it is almost completely non-reactive.
The combination of those two is the only way to get a true 200 year archival life CD-R. They aren't "cheap", usually less than a dollar each but 85 cents in a 100 pack isn't unusual. Try this google search. The second link is a place selling 100 packs for $82. That's 82 cents a piece for a CD-R that should last until the year 2200.
If you're willing to live with slightly less... I managed to pick up a pack of Fuji CD-Rs with a phthalocyanine dye layer and aluminum reflective layer. Fuji seems to think they will last 100 years, but I have my doubts. Still the #1 reason CD-Rs fail is the dye layer, not the reflective layer.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
According to this ancient Seybold report, Dataglyphs can achieve densities of a kilobyte per square inch.
DataGlyphs were featured in this /. article about chess playing scanners.
Bleh!
MAM-E Gold Ultra CD-Rs are guaranteed by the manufacturer to last for at least 200 years.
Fuji is made by Taiyo Yuden. ... TY is also making some Memorex
Both Fuji and Memorex have TY and non-TY discs. But you can, as you say, check the packaging for the country of origin. As far as 50- and 100-spindles go, every "Made in Japan" I've bought from these two brands has been TY, as reported by CDR Identifier.
--
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
These CDs WERE NOT WRITTEN TO. They were stored on the original spindles for 20 months and then HARDWARE ANALYSED. The CDs were all completely blank.
[insert witty comment here]
From a little googling, I now see that they signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Rainforest Action Network promising to change their ecologically unfriendly corporate practices. Here is the link:
http://www.ranamuck.org/news7.01mitsi.htm
Provided the humungous Mitsubishi zaibatsu is living up to their promises, I have no problems now recommending Mitsubishi Chemical CD-Rs. Everything I said about TY goes double for their disks.
The reasons why TY and Mitsubishi CD-R blanks are so good and so compatible are the fact they use a much darker dye than the Taiwanese manufacturers do. Yamaha suggested the use of Mitsubishi Chemical CD-Rs with their "Disc T@2"-equipped burners because the graphics would show up better. They are a better choice for maximum compatibility for the same reason they are a better choice for "Disc T@2". The more visible the dye layer is to the naked eye, the more visible the dye layer is to a CD-ROM or CD player's laser.
I wish I could back my assertions up with a whole list of studies, but I am basically speaking from several years of my own experience with CD-R blanks. I don't see as many CD-Rs made by TY going bad as no-name Taiwanese crap does.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I left my CDR's out for about 3 weeks and
check out the results:
http://www.techfreakz.org/cdruv/
These are name brand CDR's exposed to the
sun for only an hour or two each day.
(mod this up guys, people need to be warned).
a while back http://www.cdmediaworld.com/ had an article explaining how there were something like 256 different brands of CD media, but only something like 16 different manufacturers of the actual media.
Taiyo Yuden were reckoned to be the best manufacturer. they make discs for lots of different manufacturers, but you don't know 'til you get home and get yr CD writing software to read the code off the disc and tell you who the manufacturer is, bcos it aint gonna tell you on the packet. and different sub models of disc can be made by different manufacturers.
I think TDK even had the same models, with some made by Ritek (the worst quality) and some made by Taiyo Yuden. there was a court case against them for this.
I buy a single TDK disc, take it home and check it, and if its made by Taiyo Yuden I go back and buy loads of that same model disc, and have been able to get the people in the shop to say they'd take the discs back if they weren't Taiyo Yuden (a large consumer-space chain in the UK, I shan't name them incase they read this and stop being so remarkeably fair)
These CDs WERE NOT WRITTEN TO
And here is the key.
I've seen other tests where CD-Rs can't be written reliably after sitting around blank for a few years or artifically "flash aged" using elevated heat &c.
That matters to me a bit, but what's much more important is how reliable the data can be read after *being written*, then stored for years.
I use Kodak pseudo-golds (they don't make the real gold on gold ultima anymore) for anything I care about. The discs should be good, but they are also actually made by Kodak. No problems with the manufacturer changing & the brand remaining the same. No research on who's selling the best Taiyo Yudens this week needed.
Oh, shit! Good things never last. Well, the folks I bought my last batch of Kodak's from have a replacement: Mitsui Golds
I don't abuse my "archival" discs, so I don't care much about scratch-resistance, which is all some "life" discs offer. I care about bit rot.
The two main CD-R companies are Ricoh, in Taiwan, and Taiyo Yuden in Japan. Now which company do you suppose makes the better discs? Check the "made in, hecho... etc." label before you buy discs. "Made in Japan" discs are head and shoulders above Ricoh discs. Not only do they have higher standards in Japan, they also use higher-quality dye. After that the main thing to look for is a nice, non peeling top. I recommend Fuji, Mitsui, HP, and Kodak discs if you are looking for a CD-R that will keep your data safe. I've burned thousands of CD-Rs over the last 5+ years, and not a single one of my archive discs have ever "gone bad", or flaked out on me. Those archive discs are mostly TDKs from back when they were made by TY, and Fujis.
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.