Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span?

D

Deepak

B3D Yoddha
Veteran
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/200...mOHJv1k24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTA4ZnRnZjhkBHNlYwMxNjk1

Opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs. Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland, has his own view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime.

"Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," Gerecke says
 
Recordable CDs, like all media, have a lifespan that varies depending on the storage environment (temperature and relative humidity). Blank CDs haven't been around that long, and the materials have improved since the first prototypes, so it's impossible to say what the average lifespan will be. 5 years is awfully short though, and I know I personally have CD-Rs that were burned more than 5 years ago that work just fine. Kodak predicts their CD-Rs should last 100 years or more.
 
2 years would be a good guess if the CD is serving double duty as a coaster. If you actually store then in a CD case, I'd expect you'd get 10+ years out of them.
 
The best (cheap) medium is actually (good, like Verbatim) DVD-RW's. But to get the most out of them, you should format them five times up front.
 
It depends on the CD, I have to say that I have a Kodak CD that is my oldest still goingone, and it is perfect.

Verbatim, Imation, Memorex, TDK, Sony, and others I have tried all flake away after a few years.
 
There apparently exists three different dyes that are being used in CDR production, with very different colors and very different expected lifetimes:
  • Cyanine: green or light blue: a couple of years
  • Azo: dark blue: a couple of decades
  • Phtalocyanine: gold/silver/light green: centuries
Of course, which one your CDRs are is usually not advertised (except for the big "AZO" appearing on some Verbatim packages); there are apparently even cases of CDR makers adding extra coloring agents to make their cheapest cyanine discs not look like cyanine. You can apparently detect the dye type with the Linux 'cdrecord' program; I have however never seen a Windows program provide this information. (According to online information, the Kodak CDRs recommended in this thread are indeed Phtalocyanine.)

This of course doesn't account for environmental effects (humidity, temperature, temperature changes, pollution, sunlight, kids, xboxes etc) or lacquer quality, which obviously also have a large impact on actual longevity.

DVD-RWs, as suggested by DiGuru, could very well be more suitable for long-term data storage; the extra demands that follow with the rewriteability and precision compared to CDR have forced the use of recording materials very different from the usual CDR dyes.
 
Btw, while DVDs have smaller spots, they prevent most of the ageing problems with CDs, as they put the active layers safely in the middle of the disk.
 
DiGuru said:
Btw, while DVDs have smaller spots, they prevent most of the ageing problems with CDs, as they put the active layers safely in the middle of the disk.
Click to expand...
However, I was told that they too (including the pressed ones) decay and it's only the amount of error correction that keeps them going for so long :cry:
 
Yes they all have a rather short lifespan, optical tech isn't that advanced.
I don't find the article, but I remember it ranged from 5 to 100 years, 100 years being for pressed disks, and low quality (recordable) disks being able to be under 5 years lifespan.
Would be cool if I found that article back, it was a few years ago in a french mag...
 
Most of my burned CDs were done in 1998.
They still work.

Don't ask what's on there but I still use them often.
 
AlphaWolf said:
2 years would be a good guess if the CD is serving double duty as a coaster. If you actually store then in a CD case, I'd expect you'd get 10+ years out of them.
Click to expand...

Second that.
 
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