My 15 Years old CDs begin to show errors in EAC. Sometimes uncorrectable, but few of them.

They seem to decay rather slowly, compared to CDRs that can get uncorrectable parts in three monthes after 2 years of perfect condition.

Is this a common experience?

I admit that, if you factor in scratches, CDs may not last long. But none of mine have scratches. As long as I keep them away from light and heat (except when playing) I was assuming that they would out-live me! Archives around the world seem to be making the same assuption - some even assume that CD-Rs will last 100 years given optimal conditions.

I'm not doubting what Pio says, but do others have the same experience? In a recent(ish) discussion in the Cool Edit forum, it was most common for people to have had absolutely no problems with CDs, some of which are now nearly 20 years old.

Cheers,
David.

P.S. I suppose have "no problems" when playing is very different from having "no problems" when ripping with EAC?

I recently tried to rip 'old' audio CD-R (2 years), with EAC ; many of them were unextractable (often in the second part of the CD-R, after 20-30 minutes of playing time).

The first time I discovered it with my SAMSUNG DVD-ROM SD-612S, my liteon LTR-24102B was able to perform a fantastic job (no error !). Nowadays, both fails :/ No scratch, no dust...
But the extraction of my old pressed CD (max. 10 years) seems to be perfect (or near perfect : all errors are correctable).


I hope that my .ape compilation will last longer....

I hope quality of CD-Rs has gone up lately... That's certainly NOT the official statement from the industry...

When you mean you couldn't extract them... could you at least play them on a cdplayer? Please more details on how and why EAC failed...

marketing...



I have just try one CD on my CD player : no coarse errors. For the others CD-R, I'm not sure...
EAC : classical error correction / 5 hours per tracks / bad glitched sound...

ok then, what can i do to make sure that my PSX games stay playable after 10 years ? buy huge-ass harddrive and store images ?

Going from 75 - 100 years to an actual 2 is quite a heavy hit even for marketing....



(!)

/me looks at his CD-Rs with a lot less happiness now...

Very good marketing

I have around 20 audio CDs that are at least 14 years old. I didn't have a single error (or a CRC mismatch) during ripping.

On the other hand, i have some CD-Rs (made a few years ago with a 4x Yamaha SCSI burner) where i'm completely unable to rip the last tracks. C2 errors everywhere. I don't know how this happened; the CDs are stored in a dry, dark, well-tempered spot and have no scratches.

None of my two drives is C2 reading capable, but I have tested a 2'5 years old CD-R (...burnt with Easy CD Creator 4 - I didn't have internet then - , which is really horrible for audio extraction even on unscratched discs...)
and, fortunately double check burst-ing hasn't shown no errors. All CRCs matched. B)

The disc I used then is Kodak Ultima 80...those discs seem to be as good as they were claimed to be.
As now there are no more Kodaks out there, then I started use Samsung (Prodisc) as my most cheap discs - In a comparison on a magazine years ago, Samsungs scored 9'1 -ridiculous BLER-, while Kodak scored 9,5.

For "mastering" I use both Hi-Space Carbon and Hi-Space CarbonSound, all of them claim to have BLER <10 and last for lifetime (Hi-Space Gold goes further, claiming 100 years, but I don't find those Gold discs and my CD-R shelf is full for a long time...)

To acheive real durability it's better to use branded discs.
At least those brands whose manufacturers are known to be reliable.

I recently ripped my entire collection of 300 cds.

Four of them had incorrectable errors. I remember ripping one of them a year ago. One track was defective a year ago, two tracks now. The cds are 6-10 years old and have been listened to alot.

My recent CD-R experience was somewhat more dramatic: Four defective data discs out of 200 - all Mr. Platinimum. Only one year old.

I have an original version of toto 4, I think it was pressed in around 1980.

I ripped it again recently with --aps and EAC. Nothing was unusual speed wise, or otherwise.

FWIW

Who is the manufacturer of those discs? Check it out please.....use EAC's Display CD-R Information for that....

Ummm, I think the first pressed CD was Billy Joel's 42nd Street album back in 1982. I don't think you could buy prerecorded CDs in 1980 (though the technology was already finalized at that point).

When I think back to 1982, CDs must have been really cool and very high tech. In 1982, I was playing Pitfall on the Atari 2600 and I think the fastest IBM PC ran around 5MHz.

Some -very rarely- use CDRs made of glass. They should last 1000 years, they say.


That's what I assumed too from the fact that the first dead CDRs I got played perfectly on my Yamaha CD Player.
But recently I've performed thourough DAE quality tests on an old CDR in bad state. Not only the Yamaha played it badly, with a lot of noise, in spite of its better interpolation algorithms, but a Teac E540 CD ROM drive did a better job in burst mode ! No audible click at the beginning, where the CD payer show some, and the other CD ROM drive a lot of.
So "no problems" is not as different in EAC than in a CD Player as one would think.


Yes, but in this case, use a RAID system, because your hard discs can very well be dead after this time.


We are two now to find problems using HiSpace Carbon : http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/2979 and http://forum.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?s...&threadid=59220



List of reliable CDR brands : http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/12824

List of brands of whom dead CDRs were found : http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/3247 , summary near the end of page 1.

So far, no one reported any Tayo Yuden nor SmartBuy (prodisc) nor Verbatim azo unreadable.
HiSpace Carbon and Gold have not been long enough on the market to know if they can last longer. The Carbon concept is interesting.
The Gold layer, however, has already failed : one Mitsui Gold and some Kodak Gold reported dead (but the Kodak were dead because of the top coating peeling)

Elaborate

I inserted an emty CD-R and could not find any such option in EAC.

Hi Annuka

In EAC, press Alt+W to open the CD Layout editor. From there, go to CD-R --> Display CD-R Information...

Hope this helps,
CD

Edit: Changed quote date and time to ISO 8601 format.

I think I saw somewhere that there is a fungus that eats thru the reflective layer of a CD, making it obviously useless. I think that is what happened to my Metallica black CD... right now it has lots of holes around the edges... looks "eaten".

Also, about the glass CDs lasting 1000 years... what fails in the CD is the reflective layer, not the substrate. DVDs are safer this way, since the data layer is in the middle of the disc, not on the top like CDs.

Maybe the reflective layer is inside the glass.