>I admire your thoroughness, but I think putting my media in
>a cool, dark place will reduce its exposure to UV and temperature
>extremes. Perhaps I'll need to worry about degeneration of
>the chemicals inside the CD, or something else we're not guessing
>about today. Meanwhile, I'll cross my fingers and assume I'll have
>other media choices in the next 5-10 years that'll encourage me
>to re-copy my CD-Rs, which have patiently waited in their
>fire-proof case.
With the CompUSA cheapies, my original CD-R (a Philips
CDD2000) wouldn't even touch them. It definatley prefers the ones
with the dark blue dye. I've also had trouble with CD-R's being read
on older CD-ROMs on the cheapie disks while burning them on better
quality disks worked fine. Now I use a Philips Omniwriter and it's
less picky about the media and I'm still searching for consistent
good quality. I found an interesting site the other day that deals
with some of these questions though and even breaks down which
factories make which brands:
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_quality.shtml
For the moment though, on systems that are capable of using
the drive, I've been writing system backups and such to MO disks,
which are supposed to be much sturdier than CD-R's. At 230MB (3.5"
Fujitsu IDE drive) and 1.3gig (5.25" Pinnacle SCSI drive), the
capacity isn't too bad. Even my laptop has one of the Fujitsu drives
as a hot swappable expansion bay.
Jeff
--
Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems:
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757
Received on Tue Jul 24 2001 - 18:31:14 BST