5 ms·

I dont know how my cheap burnt CD's from the early 2000's are still fine but some of my pressed CD's are suffering from Disc rot!

daveslash 6y ago
How common is Disc Rot for pressed CD's?
- tobyhinloopen 6y ago
  I regularly buy 2nd hand audio CDs as old as the 80’s and never had a bad one
  - caseyohara 6y ago
    Probably survivorship bias as the only old CDs for sale today are in good shape
    - lb1lf 6y ago
      -Still only anecdata, but I've been buying lots of music on CD since the late eighties, the oldest I know of was pressed in late 1983 sometime. (Which is only a year or so after the introduction of the CD anyway) In sum, some 3,800 CDs. I ripped them all a couple of years ago - I had problems with a handful, but EAC eventually got them all to disk. I examined the troublesome ones, but no (visual) signs of disc rot.
  - simonblack 6y ago
    Factory-made CDs are duplicated by a physical process. Most bad CDs were made using an opto-chemical process. The chemical processes are pretty much reversible, leading to dead CDs. The physical processes are much more robust, as you'd have to deform the actual base plastic, like cooking vinyl LPs in the sun.
- Lammy 6y ago
  Much more common is top/label-side damage of the reflective substrate. The bottom is protected but the top isn't!
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  I recently bought roughly 100 CD-ROMs (~$650) from eBay of mid to late 90's Macintosh games and 3 of them were rotting (all from the outer edge, the reflectivity was lost in these spots) but still mostly readable. They were from roughly 20 different sellers in the US and Europe.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  It depends on the factory, the discs and the storage. I don't often hear of audio CDs rotting but equally I don't often hear of people still using audio CDs in any large quantities. However I do hear of people buying retro games for old CD systems like the Sega Saturn and how many of those games are suffering from rot. I'm lucky that I've not suffered any rot yet but it's only a matter of time for me because I don't store them properly either.
- stordoff 6y ago
  Not CDs, but one brand/manufacturer of HD-DVDs is notorious for rot (I've heard suggestions they used bad glue, but I haven't confirmed this). Of the 20 or so I have (all Warner Brothers IIRC), at least half are unreadable (usually the first 20-50% is readable then it errors out). They did replace 300 with a Blu-Ray copy (this was after HD-DVD was obviously on its way out), but the rest didn't fail until much later or were bought used for literally pennies. For pressed CDs, I can't ever remember getting one that was unreadable and not obviously scratched (though I did have a game CD shatter into hundreds of pieces in the drive).

daveslash 6y ago

How common is Disc Rot for pressed CD's?

tobyhinloopen 6y ago
I regularly buy 2nd hand audio CDs as old as the 80’s and never had a bad one
- caseyohara 6y ago
  Probably survivorship bias as the only old CDs for sale today are in good shape
  - lb1lf 6y ago
    -Still only anecdata, but I've been buying lots of music on CD since the late eighties, the oldest I know of was pressed in late 1983 sometime. (Which is only a year or so after the introduction of the CD anyway) In sum, some 3,800 CDs. I ripped them all a couple of years ago - I had problems with a handful, but EAC eventually got them all to disk. I examined the troublesome ones, but no (visual) signs of disc rot.
- simonblack 6y ago
  Factory-made CDs are duplicated by a physical process. Most bad CDs were made using an opto-chemical process. The chemical processes are pretty much reversible, leading to dead CDs. The physical processes are much more robust, as you'd have to deform the actual base plastic, like cooking vinyl LPs in the sun.
Lammy 6y ago
Much more common is top/label-side damage of the reflective substrate. The bottom is protected but the top isn't!
birdyrooster 6y ago
I recently bought roughly 100 CD-ROMs (~$650) from eBay of mid to late 90's Macintosh games and 3 of them were rotting (all from the outer edge, the reflectivity was lost in these spots) but still mostly readable. They were from roughly 20 different sellers in the US and Europe.
hnlmorg 6y ago
It depends on the factory, the discs and the storage. I don't often hear of audio CDs rotting but equally I don't often hear of people still using audio CDs in any large quantities. However I do hear of people buying retro games for old CD systems like the Sega Saturn and how many of those games are suffering from rot. I'm lucky that I've not suffered any rot yet but it's only a matter of time for me because I don't store them properly either.
stordoff 6y ago
Not CDs, but one brand/manufacturer of HD-DVDs is notorious for rot (I've heard suggestions they used bad glue, but I haven't confirmed this). Of the 20 or so I have (all Warner Brothers IIRC), at least half are unreadable (usually the first 20-50% is readable then it errors out). They did replace 300 with a Blu-Ray copy (this was after HD-DVD was obviously on its way out), but the rest didn't fail until much later or were bought used for literally pennies. For pressed CDs, I can't ever remember getting one that was unreadable and not obviously scratched (though I did have a game CD shatter into hundreds of pieces in the drive).