I've known for awhile that Mitsui Gold's are the best archival media around (and quite pricey), but a 300-year shelf life? That's their claim, but who's going to ever call them on it? Well, in case you guys are interested, here's a link to the media MAM-A which is a reputable dealer of Mitsui. I'd go to their website and buy it because I think Amazon charges them a fee which they add to the price when you buy from Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00065DGNC/ref=cm_bg_d_2/102-1743513-9818532?v=glance Also, a good read on the different dyes and brands. They say Taiyo Yudens and Verbatims only have a 30-year shelf-life, but my Verbatims say 100 years. So if they fail on the 99th year, I'm going to file a claim...as a ghost. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...9BC6G14P/ref=cm_bg_dp_l_1/102-1743513-9818532
theres no way in hell that they can believe that there discs will actually last that long.New recommendations from scientists believe that media actually will only last 5years instead of the predicted 100+ year mark.You would really be asking what the basis of there research is and wheres the proof.Have they actually got a 300 old cd disc or are they really only speculating that there product is that good.Gee you can hype anything these days , maybe i should borrow the tardis and go into the future 300 years to see if they really do last.
will there be anything around in 100, 200 or 300 years that will play these CD-R's though... ive tried for ages to play my 12" vinyl records on my cd player & they just will not fit in the cd tray, they're only from the early 1990's..
I think a cd-r could last 300yrs but the point is they last a long time, long enough where you can be a lazy SOB and only have to re-archive a few times during your life span bee-atches
The truth is that Cd's Last only up last up to 5 year at best if handled with the extremest care, the thing that ruins them is fungus, I have disc 3 years old that are unreadable because of this, even disc that are 1 year old that still have this problem, you can buy disc that have antifungus layer with it is almost imposible for a disc to last 300 years.
I don't think that's true. What is this fungi living off of? It's an organism that needs food and water to live and reproduce.
@ashroy01 Yes it is actually true fungus can live on cd's and make it unreadable, after some time if a cd's is not well protected mold or fungus can start taking your cds, the black spots that after some time, that can make your cds unreadable, and yes fungus can live of carbon and nitrogen of the plastic layer that covers the cd, if you have some old cds check if they have little black spots on the back that cannot be taken out, those are fungi and can make your cd unreadable in less than 2 or 3 years, I dunno if it only affects tropical climates (like where I live)but this a fact and it actually it is VERY TRUE that fungi/mold can ruin your cds and make then unreadable in a short period of time, If you dont trust me, try googling it
moisture would be necessary, it could be your climates, I don't have anything like that... happening to my cds. Oh well, I should just be lucky my stuff is safe. Goodday
Actually the fungus that was discovered for the CD's only affected on tropical climates, that may be a reason and yes we have the necesary conditions for that to happen, Im unlucky that I live in a tropical climates and I have lost several CD's but still that is a possibility that can ruin your cd's.
sub article of scubapetes original: Independent Portfolio Content Ever decreasing circlesYou know those CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that you've trusted your most precious memories to? They could be little more use than coasters after just two years. Michael Pollitt investigates21 April 2004 Are we putting too much faith in the ubiquitous "recordable CD", or CD-R? It is undeniably one of the most useful means of storage around, offering an inexpensive way to save digital photographs, music and files and costing less than 50 pence per disc.If you check the claims made by some manufacturers of popular CD-R brands, you will see that some make bold claims indeed. Typical boasts include: "100-years archival life", "guaranteed archival lifespan of more than 100 years" and "one million read cycles". One company even says data can be stored "swiftly and permanently", leaving you free to bequeath those backups of your letter to the electricity company to your great-great-grandchildren.But an investigation by a Dutch personal computer magazine, PC Active, has shown that some CD-Rs are unreadable in as little as two years, because the dyes in the CD's recording layer fade. These dyes replace the aluminum "pits" of a music CD or CD-Rom, and the laser uses that layer to distinguish 0s from 1s. When the CD is written, the writing laser "burns" the dye, which becomes dark, to represent a "1" while a "0" will be left blank so that if the dye fades, there's no difference; it's just a long string of nothing to the playback laser.So have you already lost those irreplaceable pictures you committed to the silver disc? PC Active suggests we should forget CD-Rs as a durable medium, after its own testing found some with unreadable data after just two years. "Though they looked fine from the outside, they turned out to be completely useless," wrote the technical editor Jeroen Horlings, who had tested 30 brands in 2001, left them in a dark cupboard for two years and then re-tested them in August 2003. Of the brands tested, 10 per cent showed ageing problems. And it wasn't just Horlings. After seeing the results, shocked readers contacted the magazine with their experiences.Recordable DVDs are not off the hook either. The "dye chemicals" in write-once DVDs are similar to CD-R, though recording density and disk construction differ. "We're in the process of testing DVDs and we're sure that the same problems will occur," said Horlings, who plans to publish his findings soon.Gordon Stevenson, the managing director of Vogon International - a company specializing in data recovery - is familiar with these shortcomings thanks to the experiences of his customers, one of whom commissioned Vogon to retrieve pictures of his second honeymoon from a failed six-month-old CD-R. "The dye layer was fading," Stevenson says, "but we were able to recover most of the disk. But these claims [of a 100-year archival life] are unhelpful and misleading. If you're spending 20p on something, you probably don't expect it to last 100 years," he says.In the wrong conditions, such as sunlight, humidity and upper surface damage, your CD-R will slowly turn into a coaster. "CD-Rs should never be left lying in sunlight as there's an element of light sensitivity, certainly in the poor quality media," says Stevenson. "I wouldn't rely on CD-Rs for long-term storage unless you're prepared to deal with them as recommended."Such views are echoed by the National Archives at Kew. "Generally speaking, we don't recommend CD-Rs for long-term storage," says Jeffrey Darlington, a project manager at the Archives' Digital Preservation Department. "We don't regard CD-Rs as an archival medium. Most of the CD-Rs on the market are not of archival quality." Instead of CD-Rs, therefore, the National Archives tend to use magnetic tape rated for a 30-year life. Also, they are careful to copy, check and re-copy to avoid losing information and this is also a useful strategy for CD-Rs. "If you keep doing that so the CD-R is never more than physically three to five years old, you'll be safe enough. A hundred years sounds pretty unlikely," says Darlington.Not all optical media is vulnerable. The rewritable variants (RW) use metallic materials that change the phase of the light, rather than light-sensitive dyes. Commercial magneto-optical and ultra-density optical systems are different too. Stewart Vane-Tempest, the optical product director at Plasmon, the archival specialists, has first-hand experience of unreadable CD-R media. "Some dyes are very robust, but others not," Vane-Tempest says. "The one thing they have in common is susceptibility to environmental conditions. I do a lot of digital photography and pay top price for media. If I have anything important, I generally make a couple of copies. I've not used CD-Rs for long-term archiving."Vane-Tempest also offers a tip. Blank CD-R disks have a code that your CD writer reads to find the best writing strategy. If this isn't in the CD-writer's inbuilt software (its "firmware"), the default may be a poor compromise. Vane-Tempest says that some "less scrupulous" Far East companies have been using other people's codes, with deficient results. However, there is a way around this which is to find out which brands suit your writer and ensure the firmware is up to date.While such matchmaking is useful, there's no way to assess CD-R longevity at home. All you can do is check periodically. As for whether manufacturers are guilty of using finger-in-the-air methods, Kevin Jefcoate, the marketing and product management director at Verbatim, says: "It's a bit more than guesswork because there's a lot of scientific evidence to back it up."The answer, Jefcoate says, is to use a climate chamber to accelerate the ageing of the organic dye. Using a relationship between chemical reaction rate and temperature, 100-year lifetimes may be argued for normal conditions. Jefcoate adds that he has never known users to complain of age-related failures? "We haven't had anyone complain that, after three to five years, it hasn't worked." It's easy to blame budget CD-Rs when things go wrong. Novatech's purchasing and product manager, Kriss Pomroy, suggests users buy a small quantity for testing first.The PC builder sells unbranded CD-Rs sourced from a Far East distributor that buys over-production from well-known factories. Are we saving pennies and taking risks? "No," says Pomroy, "You can get problematic batches, but that's as true with branded media." The company now sells two-and-a-half times more unbranded write-once DVDs than CD-Rs.The world's No 1 supplier of CD-Rs, Imation, talks of "saving precious digital photo memories" - exactly what many people think they're doing. Semar Majid, its technical marketing executive, hasn't heard of any ageing problems. "Optical media should last between 30 and 200 years," he says, "but it's dependent on storage conditions and how you handle it." He suggests transferring important photos to DVD, and keeping on moving to new formats.Another big maker, TDK, takes a cautious view with DVDs, claiming only a 70-year lifespan. "This does not mean that DVD is more fragile or unstable in time compared to CD-R; this is only because of the shorter experience that we have in manufacturing and testing this relatively young technology," says the TDK product manager Hartmut Kulessa. There have been no complaints about ageing failures.As the oldest CD-R is barely a teenager, there are no definitive answers either. But perhaps the last word belongs to Jeroen Horlings at PC Active. "We see a lot of manufacturers and they think that quantity is more important than quality," he says. "The problem will remain."For more info on CD-Rs and dyes: www.burnworld.com/cdr/primer/whatis.htm; www.xdr2.com/CDR-Info/Dye.htm
Well as we all have proved a CD cant last 100 years srry there are many reasons for this not happen, although I have Cd's that have lasted 3 or 4 years but they were handled very carefully, so lets also take in account that handling and care could affect the live of CD'S
CDs will last more than 5 years. My CD music collection (which includes presed and burned CDRs) proves this. They may not last 300 years or even 30 years, but they will certainly outgrow their usefulness to me long before they fail. In other words, I have tons of 1.44MB floppies that still work fine, but I haven't used them in years. For archival, optical media is still superior to hard drives since there are no moving parts subject to wear and tear as well as heat. If you buy decent media, archival life should not be a problem.
