Hey, I thought everyone here should read this... Apparently those CD-r's we buy at the store only last on average 2-5 years... http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/200...XNnFQWs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3ODdxdHBhBHNlYwM5NjQ- Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam. "Many of the cheap burnable CDs available at discount stores have a life span of around two years," Gerecke says. "Some of the better-quality discs offer a longer life span, of a maximum of five years." Distinguishing high-quality burnable CDs from low-quality discs is difficult, he says, because few vendors use life span as a selling point.
This has always been an issue for those in the digital photography business that have to keep high quality files for a significant amount of time. One of my photographer buddies stores files on large hard-drives instead of CD-R.
i have lots of them,burned when napster just starts. all works fine so far. with today hard drive prices and sizes all data can be transfered and stored on them in minutes. i'm planning to build some sort of jukebox for mp3 from my old P2, using HD, unstead of traditional cd changer.
Last year I bought 4. The last one keeps on going. The others didn't. No trivial reformatting problem or so but truly failing usb interface problems. Tested on about 6 different computers. For me CD's are much more reliable than flash drives although flash drives should be intrinsically more reliable. The problem seems to be with crappy cheap country usb interface chips. I don't trust either of those though. Hard Drives with proper backups are the ONLY reliable storage. The rest is only for uncritical convenience.
I think magneto optical drive optical disk have a life of 20 years minimum. MO disk are reasonably priced but the MO drives are a bit pricey.
When I read the article yesterday on Slashdot (linked below) there was a lot of commentary about the author of the story (who seems to have a bias to recommend mag tape storage since he works for IBM storage). One good point the detractors made that attacked the credibility of the original article was the lumping of CDR and CDRW media types together even thought they are actually quite different in how they work (and thus how long one might expect them to last). Anyway, just because its on the internet doesnt make it true... http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/10/1447213&tid=198