>Jeff Hellige wrote:
> >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
Jerome Fine replies:
I don't have the time right now to look, but thank you!
> 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.
I have acquired a Sony SMO S501 and some cartridges. I understand
that the company I bought them from used them for backup for at least
5 years. While each side of the cartridge holds only 300 MBytes, at least
the total capacity (both sides) is almost equal to a CD. And although
they are a bit slow on the WRITE operation, the READ operations are
almost as fast as a hard disk drive.
I don't know about retention, but I expect I will be making a backup of the
long term files about every one or two years. Does anyone know how I
might test a magneto optical cartridge for long term degradation? Also,
if I can read the cartridge, does that indicate it is as good as when it
was written or should it always be written again after 5 years just to be
sure?
If anyone ever sees a Sony SMO S501 for $ US 20 or less, please send it
to me and I will always appreciate and accept it and pay you for the drive
and shipping in the US and Canada. Shipping from Europe is still too expensive.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
Received on Tue Jul 24 2001 - 19:58:43 BST