[NTLUG:Discuss] CD Turning 25

[Robert Pearson]

On 8/18/07, Steve Baker <steve at sjbaker.org> wrote:
> Robert Pearson wrote:
>
> > That is amazing!
> > What's the oldest CD/DVD you have been able to recover from?
>
> Well, I bought a CD (audio) player the first day Philips sold them in
> their staff shop to employees.  That was about a month before they sold
> them to the general public.  I bought three CD's on that day: Brothers
> in Arms (Dire Straits) - which is the one almost everyone bought.  A
> disk of some classical stuff (I think it was Bach) and a Glenn Miller
> CD.
>
> The Brothers in Arms CD (which has to be one of the oldest CD's in
> existance) still plays perfectly.  I don't know what happened to the
> Bach and my Glenn Miller CD was stolen from my car a couple of years
> ago - but it was playing just fine up until that point.
>
> > I was full of confidence about CD/DVD Storage until I started reading
> > about the archive life properties:
> > <<http://computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,107607,00.html>>
>
> Sure - for important archival stuff you'd be best advised to store in
> multiple media types in multiple locations.

That certainly is true for me with my audio CDs as well. Thank goodness!
In the article at the URL above they talk to this point.
Audio CDs are generally mastered on media designed to last longer than
2-5 years. Although that is changing in the interest of greed.

According to the article, the culprit is the media and the PC writer.
More durable media takes a more powerful CD/DVD writer than what comes
in a PC. I don't fully understand the physics of it but it has to do
with the laser that writes the media.
Using one of these more powerful CD/DVD writers does not seem to buy
any more archive life time if the media is the cheapest money can buy,
but proven reliable through personal experience. We trust it to work.

I have talked with people who claim to have CDs older than 5 years
that are still readable. My guess it is like air conditioners or
refrigerators. Some of them last far longer than the manufacturers
warranty. But that is just a guess.

According to a quick Google, Pioneer introduced the first PC DVD writer in 1997.