Re: OT: tape (was Cds)

["Travis Hartnett" <travishartnett@gmail.com>]

I've been hearing about how CD's "go bad" after a few years ever since I bought my first CD player...twenty years ago.  I still have the first CD I bought (and pretty much all of them since then), and they play fine.  I've never taken any special care of them, other that storing them in jewel cases when they're not being played.  I don't believe that CD's sitting on a shelf go bad unless there was some sort of manufacturing defect.  I remember around the same time I heard CD's went bad, I was told by the same folks that CD's would sound better if you colored the edges with a green sharpie.  Or a black one.  Or was in the inner ring?

Then you'd hear that CD-R's would go bad.  The theory behind this (heat kills CD-R's because they're a product of laser-driven thermal printing) sounded a little more plausible, but I've been burning CD-R's for ten years now, and I have all my original masters, which I've been slightly more careful with (never storing them in a car where they'd get hot), but I had to pull a bunch of things off of my oldest CD-R's the other day, and I had zero problems.

So, I'm skeptical of the fragility of CD's.

TravisH

On 1/28/07, Daryl Shawn <highhorse@mhorse.com > wrote:

Hmm....gotta google that, it's what I've heard informally for some time
but now ya got my back 'gainst the wall.

This is probably the strongest support for my wayward claim (in fact,
this posits two-five years...):

http://computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,107607,00.html

Here's some other articles that don't make such claims, in fact say that
cdr's could last 100 years or even more with optimal conditions, but in
less than ideal conditions could just last a year or two (which is
somewhat more consistent with my own experience, I've had lots of
problems with burned discs from five years ago or less).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R
http://www.clir.org/PUBS/reports/pub121/sec4.html

Ultimately, the technology hasn't been around long enough for us to know
for sure, so I should probably keep my mouth (more) shut.  With tape, we
have more history to go by. I'd be curious what others have heard and
experienced.

Daryl Shawn
www.swanwelder.com