World's Crappiest Drives (was Re: A&J Microdrive)

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Thu Dec 7 13:17:04 2000

"Michael Nadeau" <menadeau_at_mediaone.net> wrote:
> I believe that glass and gold discs are available for archival purposes with
> guarantees of holding data for 100 years.

I haven't seen any glass CD-Rs. Glass discs are used for mastering pressed
CDs, but are very fragile. You wouldn't want to use them for archival
data.

CD-Rs use a polycarbonate substrate just like CDs.

CD-Rs with a gold reflective layer are believed to offer 100 year data
retention when stored properly, and there are published white papers and
reports on the test methods that established this figure. However, AFAIK
*NOONE* will guarantee a disc for anywhere near that long.

It is possible (and the Kodak white paper mentions) that there may be
unknown failure modes in long-term storage that do not occur in
accelerated aging tests.
Received on Thu Dec 07 2000 - 13:17:04 GMT