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Up To 10% of CD-Rs Fail Within a Few Years

Posted by kdawson on from the nothing-lasts-forever-mister-bond dept.

Whatever you think about the likelihood that a new kind of DVDs could last for 1,000 years, this note from reader crazyeyes should give you pause about expecting current CD-Rs to be reliably readable for decades. TechARP found a failure rate near 10% for CD-Rs recorded 7 to 9 years ago, after storage in ideal conditions. On some, one or more individual files could not be recovered; others were not reliably readable on two separate drives. "In the past, hard disk drives were small (in capacity) and costly. To make up for the lack of affordable storage, many turned to CD-Rs. As it became common to store backups and personal pictures, videos, etc. on CD-Rs, the lifespan of these discs became a concern. According to manufacturers, CD-Rs should last for decades. Some even quoted an upper limit of 120 years based on accelerated aging tests! That sure is a long time, isn't it? But will CD-Rs really last that long?"

6 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. According to... by NervousNerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    According to manufacturers, CD-Rs should last for decades.

    According to their marketing dept., rather.

    1. Re:According to... by w0mprat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I reccently went back to CD-Rs from the 90s, and didn't really think much of it. I have a stack of about 25%-30% unreadable CD-Rs from less than 5 years old. Interestingly these are mixed brands, some of the buggered ones.

      I would suggest as the cost per unit fell through the floor, so did any regard for quality control as well as the consumers lack of motiviation to drive all the way back to the store and get a replacement.

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  2. Follow the Orange Book by La+Gris · · Score: 4, Insightful

    120yers, lets start with archive rated CD-R, and use a decent recorder with a tray. Then write according to the orange book specifications.

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    Léa Gris
  3. Not sure that hard drives are any better... by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The summary seems to want to lead us to backing up on hard drives:

    In the past, hard disk drives were small (in capacity) and costly. To make up for the lack of affordable storage, many turned to CD-Rs.

    Though I'm not convinced many consumer hard drives have shelf lives on the same order as the optical media that some of us are backing up to. Add to that the fact that hard drive interfaces do change fairly often (some of us still have systems in the transitional period between IDE and SATA), and you could have potentially more irritating problems if you were to back up to hard drives instead.

    I suspect for paranoid user it may be more cost effective to backup multiple times to CD-R rather than to a hard drive. And on top of that, if one CD of your backup set goes, you are only out 700 MB or so. If you have a series of backups on a single 100+ GB hard drive, and it fails, you may be out everything that was on that drive.

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    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    1. Re:Not sure that hard drives are any better... by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It depends though, you can get SATA to USB docks for next to nothing and I don't see USB going out anytime soon, if anything the external HD will crash (or end up being terribly obsolete) before USB gets replaced with anything more than the next version of USB. I mean, with USB appearing on -everything- from cell phones, to game consoles, to cigarette port chargers and more, I just can't see it being replaced especially when some legacy ports are still on many computers (does anyone really connect their printer via parallel port anymore? and aside from legacy systems and embedded systems does anyone still use the serial port?)

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  4. Buy Quality Blanks!!! by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Studies" like this are useless if they don't include information from the codes off the CD's (not the label on the box!) as to who the manufacturer is.

    Get the Taiyo Yuden and MAM-A Gold blanks and you won't have issues like this.

    Also please read the Wikipedia article on CD-ROMs, and expecially the references. You WILL end up with better burns if you do.