7 ms·
Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan
- dmitrygr 2y agoThis is not, as one might guess from the title, a test of data longevity on disks
- pimlottc 2y agoAgree, I was also mislead by the submission title, which has been changed from the original article title: "Optical Discs From Japan – Part 6: TDK UV Guard, Fuji, LG/Sony, Maxell, CMC"
- csdvrx 2y ago> Agree, I was also mislead by the submission title, which has been changed from the original article title: "Optical Discs From Japan – Part 6: TDK UV Guard, Fuji, LG/Sony, Maxell, CMC" I changed the original title, to express it's testing "new old stock" of DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later, as in "writing to these DVD-R and CD-R that were made a long time ago, and kept in their box". Quoting from the article: "The Fuji did well even after all these years – it’s likely that disc is at least 25 years old. " I think this is more informative than the original title, because there is not much interest in testing how to burn optical media (we have figured that out by how), while checking in great detail if OLD optical media can STILL be burned is very interesting! I was captivated by the spectrometer test to check the UV protection, as I would expect that to be the #1 problem for data longevity testing.
- LiquidPolymer 2y agoI also thought this was a longevity test. I do love optical media and have a considerable CD, DVD, minidisc, and blu-ray collection. Like a Luddite, I still enjoy burning my own. I especially like my Superscope disc copier. It completely disregards copy protection and I frequently make a backup of my favorite CDs which I store. Although much of my stock are older blanks (like those listed in this article)I’ll be sad if CD-R disappears from the market.
- Teever 2y agoCould you recommend a usb CD drive for ripping audio CDs? A local library that I frequent has an extensive jazz collection and I'd like to rip it before they remove it, as I think it's just a matter of time before they do so.
- fsckboy 2y agoany CD-R drive can do that, and they are dirt cheap (you should only say CD for audio which refers to audio output rather than the audio CDs themselves) CD-R drives can read audio CDs. so can DVD-R drives with computer interfaces.
- jogu 2y agoAny drive will be capable of ripping just fine. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty finding a drive with well known read offsets and the ability to defeat the drive cache is a good bet so you can compare against the accuraterip database. https://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm https://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm
- rahimnathwani 2y agoNot all CD-ROM drives, even those that can play audio, can be used to rip digital audio. Some only have an analogue audio output for playing CDs. I know at least some IDE CD-ROM drives can't read digital audio. It might be true that all SATA drives can read digital audio.
- eisa01 2y agoIf you have an old mac, you can take out the SuperDrive and use that! Worked flawlessly in contrast to a no-name USB DVD drive I bought on AliExpress
- mahrain 2y agoMy experience with Aliexpress USB CD drives is they contain recycled laptop optical drives, sometimes over a decade old!
- quantadev 2y agoIMO the only way to perfectly protect yourself against Ransomware Attacks is with CD-Rs, because it's something not even hardware can alter. A skilled take over of the root level of a machine can be encrypting everything and you'd never know it, until the day it denies your access, by deleting an encryption key until you pay up to get it back...you hope.
- berbec 2y agoi use dropbox
- quantadev 2y agoSpeaking of that...I need to look into online storage solutions myself. I mean even a zip file on Google Drive! Not doing that currently. I always rotate thru literally 20 different devices for my backups, but if a meteor hits my house it's all gone. So many non-technical people think "a backup" is enough. I learned long ago to keep 20.
- fbnlsr 2y agoI personally use a hard drive in my house, and a cold storage solution (Glacier) from a reputable provider.
- throwup238 2y agoI use FTP.
- esafak 2y agoThis would have been a great comment if you were that original 'why not use FTP?' guy :)
- t90fan 2y agoThings like RDX backup cartridges have a physical write protect lever on them A few years ago (before affordable cloud backup offerings) this was fairly common for Small Businesses to use, for this reason.
- somat 2y agoWith regards to the first one described the TDK with the UV guard, I am curious as to what that is. My guess is it has more to do with avoiding UV related damage than blocking UV. I am not sure the authors spectrometer test(which was very cool, avidly reading that series of articles right now) would reveal anything as polycarbonate is naturally quite opaque to uv light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate#/media/File:VisibleLightSpectrum2.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate#/media/File:Visi... Note how the transmission is dramatically reduced once past violet. Fun fact ordinary clear polycarbonate eyeglasses do just as good a job as sun glasses at protecting your eyes from uv.
- MelodyUwU 2y agoCD-Rs are great, especially taiyo yuden
- netrap 2y agoOut of business for awhile now.. I'd guess 90% or more CD-Rs made now are CMC. Ritek might still make some. There is also falconrak in UAE making them. At this point I am curious if anyone in Japan is still doing it... Does Memory-Tech in japan make recordable media??
- throwaway2037 2y agoTo be clear, Taiyo Yuden sold their patents and manuf equipment to CMC Magnetics in Taiwan. I never heard of Falcon Tech Int'l before today. I found info about their CD-Rs/DVD-Rs here: https://falconrak.com/product/products-matrix-2/ https://falconrak.com/product/products-matrix-2/
- ndiddy 2y agoTaiyo Yuden sold their process and tooling to CMC, and they're now sold as "CMC Pro" discs. I previously used JVC branded Japanese Taiyo Yuden discs. I switched to CMC Pro when I ran out, and haven't noticed any difference in quality.
- Lammy 2y agoGreat choice with the Pioneer DVR-111. They're my favorite series of drives ever. NEC ND-3500 chipset; Pioneer mechanism. Pioneer publish the approved media list for their drives but it's not really detailed enough since it only lists by manufacturer while the firmware is operating on manufacturer plus media code: https://www.mfdigital.com/downloads/Pioneer%20111%20approved%20media.pdf https://www.mfdigital.com/downloads/Pioneer%20111%20approved... You can potentially get better results by patching your discs into your drive's firmware using MediaCodeSpeedEdit: https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/ https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/
- unwind 2y agoYes, of course there is software to patch firmware of "ancient" optical drives in order to support media that wasn't supported at the time of manufacture. Of course. Sometimes, I actually love 2025 a little bit. Thanks.
- Lammy 2y ago2004–2011 actually :) https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/changelog.txt https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/changelog.txt > 1.1.0.8 14 Oct 2007 — added read speed patch for PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-111/112/212 drives, increasing +/-R read speed from 12x to 16x, +/-DL/RW from 8x to 12x. This patch is not available for 109/110 drives because 16x/12x is a bit too fast for smooth reading on these drives. > 1.1.0.1 01 May 2007 — added RPC1 patch for DVR-111 and DVR-112 firmwares, added flasher patch allowing downgrade and 'same to same' flashing for DVR-111 and DVR-112 firmware flasher > 1.0.8.18 10 Sep 2006 — added support for PIONEER DVR-111D 1.29, DVR-111 1.29 > 1.0.8.17 18 Jul 2006 — added support for Pioneer (Buffalo) DVR-111D 8.25, DVR-111L 8.26
- linsomniac 2y agoOne thing that really stuck out to me in the write speed graphs is the dropouts in the speed. The Maxell seemed to be the only one that didn't have them. Back in the day my company had a regionally-slightly-popular Linux distro. Every couple months we'd burn 500-700 discs. We were small enough that it didn't make sense to mass produce, so we burned them ourselves. We would occasionally get reports from people of being unable to read the discs, and so we went through ~6 months of investigation, test shipping to relatives, paying our customers to ship the discs back so we could check them. Eventually I found that while every disc would validate by checksum of the entire disc (part of our burn process), if I tracked the time required to read every block, the discs that people had problems with would tend to have some spikes in the time it took to read some blocks. The drives we were using would read them, sometimes taking an amazingly long time to do so (like 30 minutes instead of 2), but users drives would just fail them. Eventually I wrote a new validation process that in addition to the checksum used the timing information as well to determin if the disc failed, and at that point our failures in the field basically went to 0. But, we got really sensitive to vendors of discs. Basically it was Taiyo Yuden or nothing. Some big brands would give us 20% failures to burn, where Taiyo Yuden was <1%.
- lifeofguenter 2y agowas this maybe an issue with the cd-writer? maybe at the speeds it was writing with?
- linsomniac 2y agoI mean maybe, we had a few different models we burned with, but only a few. With the volume we needed to burn, we needed the speed. But, as a counter-point, I will say that with Taiyo Yuden discs our failures were very low, so the drives were only a component. IIRC we were using a lot of LiteOn drives which at the time were not bad.
- banqjls 2y agoIt’s sad how Japanese brand names went from “sign of quality” to “basically non existent”
- 2y ago
- smeeger 2y agowhere is he buying these discs?
- hardoff 2y ago[dead]
- ksec 2y agoI will take this opportunity and ask. Are there any special CD / DVD player where it could better read very old disk?
- Damogran6 2y agoI had PILES of CD-R and CD-RW from the turn of the century that are coasters now. Stored in the dry and dark...just absolutely unreadable. Oddly, the photo CDs I got professionally written were great.
- rbanffy 2y agoA durability test would be an interesting future article. I need to dig up my old backups and check how readable they are now.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoI have CD-Rs from decades ago that are fine... but I always used the whatever the Library of Congress used for archival purposes (they were the pricey dual layer gold ones from Verbatim)
- some-guy 2y agoSame here, but I have since re-backed them up to "cold" spare internal hard drives I have lying around that remain unplugged, in addition to my NAS storage. I just cannot trust them.