4 ms·

As far as I know, we don't even know the length of time CDs will last because they haven't been around long enough. I would love someone to correct me if I'm wr

As far as I know, we don't even know the length of time CDs will last because they haven't been around long enough. I would love someone to correct me if I'm wrong.

madengr 7y ago
CD-R are maybe 10 years. Floppies are more reliable. I have plenty of C64 and Apple II floppies that work fine.
- einr 7y ago
  Floppies are more reliable. I have plenty of C64 and Apple II floppies that work fine. 5,25" floppies (especially lower density variants like the ones you mention) are quite reliable indeed, but the most recently common 1.44 MB 3,5" floppy is terrible.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Nope, when I was using 1.44MB floppies, they were extremely reliable. However, after most people had moved on, when I did use more recently-manufactured ones, they were indeed terrible. My theory is that, when Zip disks and CD-Rs took over and people stopped using 1.44MB floppies, the manufacturing of them changed, and both the disks and the drives became much crappier than they used to be. The drive manufacturing moved from Japan to Thailand, for instance, for some of the drives I looked at, and the components were noticeably crappier (drive motors much smaller, for instance). These were the days when every PC had a 1.44MB drive just for Windows XP drivers, and no one ever used the drive for anything else because it was just too small, so the OEMs really cut back on the quality since the drives weren't expected to be used much. But back in the early 90s, it wasn't like that; those disks were totally bulletproof, just like all the other floppies.
    - madengr 7y ago
      I'm having the same issue with CD drives. The quality now is garbage, compared to the days of caddy loading. Recently bought 4 at $18 each, and will just through them out when they break. Even the Windows support of CDs has gone to shit. Windows 10 usually can't figure out if the burned CD was already ejected and inserted with a fresh one, and randomly retains files from the previous burn. Ripping audio CDs is slower than it used to be as the drives seem to become unbalanced.
    - einr 7y ago
      Here's me replying to a 12 day old comment, but... You are right that at some point they started making (much) worse quality 1.44MB floppies (and drives, probably, though I have had nothing but good experiences with mid-2000's floppy drives so far), but I still say they're much less reliable overall than most 5,25" formats. I say this partly because I have a retro-computing hobby and when acquiring random floppies from various places my experience is that 360K floppies from the mid-80's almost invariably still work fine while DD and HD 3,5" floppies from the late 80's to mid 90's are about 50-75% unreadable garbage at this point. They just don't survive. I also remember having to throw out a lot of 3,5" floppies (name-brand, too; Sony, Verbatim, etc...) due to them becoming unreadable in just a few years in the late 90's. I mean, it's not surprising. Each bit is simply much physically larger on a 5,25" floppy.
- whoopdedo 7y ago
  There are CD-R and DVD-R made for archival. MAM-A/Mitsui has tested their Gold reflective layer CD-Rs with their Mitsui dye, to withstand the full spectrum of light, same as the sun, for 100 continuous hours without damage. Using data from tests like these, industry standard guidelines predict that MAM Gold CD-R will last greater than 100 years! (In fact, if you extend the data, MAM-A predicts a lifetime of up to 300 years before failing at the Orange Book limit of 220 CPS)
  - eatbitseveryday 7y ago
    Please avoid using code blocks for quotation. It creates side-scrolling windows. Just a sideways carrot > or italics is sufficient.
- eru 7y ago
  Pressed CDs should last much longer than CD-R.
  - robdachshund 7y ago
    This is true, but tape lasts much much longer. I know people have issues with floppies, but I wonder if that is more to do with dirty floppy drives that need to be cleaned, and the fact that it's harder to use tape for digital storage vs analog as you have to read encoded signals and convert to digital values vs having a few small dropouts on a cassette recording or a vhs. Floppies are really just tape in a disc format, and use heads to read high and low signals and deduce the 1s and 0s. It stands to reason they should last quite a long time considering audio/video/data tapes can last over 50 years.
    - madengr 7y ago
      One of my bucket list projects is to use an SDR to forward error correct and modulate raw data into something that is compatible with NTSC VHS recorders. I wonder what the capacity of VHS tape is, given the restrictions of the NTSC modulation? I believe, back in the 80’s, someone made a ISA card for PC backup to VHS.
      - mrguyorama 7y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU NTSC video signals offer a lot of bandwidth but very very few promises about the quality of the reproduction of the stored waveform
- mburns 7y ago
  M-DISC claims a much, much longer lifespan for writable DVD/Bluray discs. Readable by normal drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- Zenst 7y ago
  Punched cards are for me one of the most reliable mediums ever, in terms of proven to last without media decline (though keep away from snails). So be thankful they didn't reinvent those, only using plastic instead of paper based card. Though plastic punched cards would last a very long time and also be imune to EMP, water...many things that other forms of media fall foul of. Just don't get the storage capaicty there and if they are using systems that fit data on a floppy. Well, a CD based media would perhaps be overkill. As for CD quality, that can vary a lot with some lasting since day one, others - rusting away (literally I have old CD's from the early days, some fine, others have rust holes due to impurities in manufacture). But like most things, you don't appreciate the quality of the product until time has past and it still just works.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  Floppies from the last decade of their reign were absolute garbage. I had many that didn't last more than a week before they started throwing errors. That's when I switched to FTPing schoolwork to my free 10 MB ISP spacr despite still being on 56k
robdachshund 7y ago
CDs already get disc rot, sometimes just after a few years if they are cheap. Don't forget, CDs have been out since 82, and they were not the first optical disc format around, either. Tapes however, can last 50+ years. It's a much better medium than most think it is, for analog or digital storage. Heck, a reel to reel tape unit offers the best analog sound quality you can get.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  But the optical discs from before the CD era used gold as the base material, CDs use Aluminum.
- Zenst 7y ago
  I have CD's from that period - some fine as, others disc rot most evident. Even had rot in gold layered ones (few VCD's I had). Gets down to manufacturing quality and in just the same way silicon chips are made, not all chips are equal and work perfect forever. Same with media. Tape has done well, however when you look at how it was used and how it is used today. The density of data is much tighter today than the 80's era. So tolerance of errors was greater and more forgiving as data would be stored in a larger area, so a few atoms going adrift won't stand out, when you get into density when a few atoms is your data, errors are statistically more prone to happen.

As far as I know, we don't even know the length of time CDs will last because they haven't been around long enough. I would love someone to correct me if I'm wrong.

madengr 7y ago

CD-R are maybe 10 years. Floppies are more reliable. I have plenty of C64 and Apple II floppies that work fine.

einr 7y ago
Floppies are more reliable. I have plenty of C64 and Apple II floppies that work fine. 5,25" floppies (especially lower density variants like the ones you mention) are quite reliable indeed, but the most recently common 1.44 MB 3,5" floppy is terrible.
- magduf 7y ago
  Nope, when I was using 1.44MB floppies, they were extremely reliable. However, after most people had moved on, when I did use more recently-manufactured ones, they were indeed terrible. My theory is that, when Zip disks and CD-Rs took over and people stopped using 1.44MB floppies, the manufacturing of them changed, and both the disks and the drives became much crappier than they used to be. The drive manufacturing moved from Japan to Thailand, for instance, for some of the drives I looked at, and the components were noticeably crappier (drive motors much smaller, for instance). These were the days when every PC had a 1.44MB drive just for Windows XP drivers, and no one ever used the drive for anything else because it was just too small, so the OEMs really cut back on the quality since the drives weren't expected to be used much. But back in the early 90s, it wasn't like that; those disks were totally bulletproof, just like all the other floppies.
  - madengr 7y ago
    I'm having the same issue with CD drives. The quality now is garbage, compared to the days of caddy loading. Recently bought 4 at $18 each, and will just through them out when they break. Even the Windows support of CDs has gone to shit. Windows 10 usually can't figure out if the burned CD was already ejected and inserted with a fresh one, and randomly retains files from the previous burn. Ripping audio CDs is slower than it used to be as the drives seem to become unbalanced.
  - einr 7y ago
    Here's me replying to a 12 day old comment, but... You are right that at some point they started making (much) worse quality 1.44MB floppies (and drives, probably, though I have had nothing but good experiences with mid-2000's floppy drives so far), but I still say they're much less reliable overall than most 5,25" formats. I say this partly because I have a retro-computing hobby and when acquiring random floppies from various places my experience is that 360K floppies from the mid-80's almost invariably still work fine while DD and HD 3,5" floppies from the late 80's to mid 90's are about 50-75% unreadable garbage at this point. They just don't survive. I also remember having to throw out a lot of 3,5" floppies (name-brand, too; Sony, Verbatim, etc...) due to them becoming unreadable in just a few years in the late 90's. I mean, it's not surprising. Each bit is simply much physically larger on a 5,25" floppy.
whoopdedo 7y ago
There are CD-R and DVD-R made for archival. MAM-A/Mitsui has tested their Gold reflective layer CD-Rs with their Mitsui dye, to withstand the full spectrum of light, same as the sun, for 100 continuous hours without damage. Using data from tests like these, industry standard guidelines predict that MAM Gold CD-R will last greater than 100 years! (In fact, if you extend the data, MAM-A predicts a lifetime of up to 300 years before failing at the Orange Book limit of 220 CPS)
- eatbitseveryday 7y ago
  Please avoid using code blocks for quotation. It creates side-scrolling windows. Just a sideways carrot > or italics is sufficient.
eru 7y ago
Pressed CDs should last much longer than CD-R.
- robdachshund 7y ago
  This is true, but tape lasts much much longer. I know people have issues with floppies, but I wonder if that is more to do with dirty floppy drives that need to be cleaned, and the fact that it's harder to use tape for digital storage vs analog as you have to read encoded signals and convert to digital values vs having a few small dropouts on a cassette recording or a vhs. Floppies are really just tape in a disc format, and use heads to read high and low signals and deduce the 1s and 0s. It stands to reason they should last quite a long time considering audio/video/data tapes can last over 50 years.
  - madengr 7y ago
    One of my bucket list projects is to use an SDR to forward error correct and modulate raw data into something that is compatible with NTSC VHS recorders. I wonder what the capacity of VHS tape is, given the restrictions of the NTSC modulation? I believe, back in the 80’s, someone made a ISA card for PC backup to VHS.
    - mrguyorama 7y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU NTSC video signals offer a lot of bandwidth but very very few promises about the quality of the reproduction of the stored waveform
mburns 7y ago
M-DISC claims a much, much longer lifespan for writable DVD/Bluray discs. Readable by normal drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Zenst 7y ago
Punched cards are for me one of the most reliable mediums ever, in terms of proven to last without media decline (though keep away from snails). So be thankful they didn't reinvent those, only using plastic instead of paper based card. Though plastic punched cards would last a very long time and also be imune to EMP, water...many things that other forms of media fall foul of. Just don't get the storage capaicty there and if they are using systems that fit data on a floppy. Well, a CD based media would perhaps be overkill. As for CD quality, that can vary a lot with some lasting since day one, others - rusting away (literally I have old CD's from the early days, some fine, others have rust holes due to impurities in manufacture). But like most things, you don't appreciate the quality of the product until time has past and it still just works.
kalleboo 7y ago
Floppies from the last decade of their reign were absolute garbage. I had many that didn't last more than a week before they started throwing errors. That's when I switched to FTPing schoolwork to my free 10 MB ISP spacr despite still being on 56k

robdachshund 7y ago

CDs already get disc rot, sometimes just after a few years if they are cheap. Don't forget, CDs have been out since 82, and they were not the first optical disc format around, either. Tapes however, can last 50+ years. It's a much better medium than most think it is, for analog or digital storage. Heck, a reel to reel tape unit offers the best analog sound quality you can get.

jacquesm 7y ago
But the optical discs from before the CD era used gold as the base material, CDs use Aluminum.
Zenst 7y ago
I have CD's from that period - some fine as, others disc rot most evident. Even had rot in gold layered ones (few VCD's I had). Gets down to manufacturing quality and in just the same way silicon chips are made, not all chips are equal and work perfect forever. Same with media. Tape has done well, however when you look at how it was used and how it is used today. The density of data is much tighter today than the 80's era. So tolerance of errors was greater and more forgiving as data would be stored in a larger area, so a few atoms going adrift won't stand out, when you get into density when a few atoms is your data, errors are statistically more prone to happen.