[HN Gopher] Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks...
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Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan
Author : csdvrx
Score : 164 points
Date : 2025-04-01 21:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (goughlui.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (goughlui.com)
| dmitrygr wrote:
| This is not, as one might guess from the title, a test of data
| longevity on disks
| pimlottc wrote:
| Agree, I was also mislead by the submission title, which has
| been changed from the original article title: "Optical Discs
| From Japan - Part 6: TDK UV Guard, Fuji, LG/Sony, Maxell, CMC"
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Agree, I was also mislead by the submission title, which
| has been changed from the original article title: "Optical
| Discs From Japan - Part 6: TDK UV Guard, Fuji, LG/Sony,
| Maxell, CMC"
|
| I changed the original title, to express it's testing "new
| old stock" of DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later, as in "writing
| to these DVD-R and CD-R that were made a long time ago, and
| kept in their box".
|
| Quoting from the article: "The Fuji did well even after all
| these years - it's likely that disc is at least 25 years old.
| "
|
| I think this is more informative than the original title,
| because there is not much interest in testing how to burn
| optical media (we have figured that out by how), while
| checking in great detail if OLD optical media can STILL be
| burned is very interesting!
|
| I was captivated by the spectrometer test to check the UV
| protection, as I would expect that to be the #1 problem for
| data longevity testing.
| LiquidPolymer wrote:
| I also thought this was a longevity test.
|
| I do love optical media and have a considerable CD, DVD,
| minidisc, and blu-ray collection. Like a Luddite, I still enjoy
| burning my own.
|
| I especially like my Superscope disc copier. It completely
| disregards copy protection and I frequently make a backup of my
| favorite CDs which I store. Although much of my stock are older
| blanks (like those listed in this article)I'll be sad if CD-R
| disappears from the market.
| Teever wrote:
| Could you recommend a usb CD drive for ripping audio CDs? A
| local library that I frequent has an extensive jazz collection
| and I'd like to rip it before they remove it, as I think it's
| just a matter of time before they do so.
| fsckboy wrote:
| any CD-R drive can do that, and they are dirt cheap (you
| should only say CD for audio which refers to audio output
| rather than the audio CDs themselves) CD-R drives can read
| audio CDs.
|
| so can DVD-R drives with computer interfaces.
| jogu wrote:
| Any drive will be capable of ripping just fine. If you really
| want to get into the nitty gritty finding a drive with well
| known read offsets and the ability to defeat the drive cache
| is a good bet so you can compare against the accuraterip
| database.
|
| https://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm
| eisa01 wrote:
| If you have an old mac, you can take out the SuperDrive and
| use that!
|
| Worked flawlessly in contrast to a no-name USB DVD drive I
| bought on AliExpress
| mahrain wrote:
| My experience with Aliexpress USB CD drives is they contain
| recycled laptop optical drives, sometimes over a decade
| old!
| Lammy wrote:
| Fun fact: in the G4/G5 era, the SuperDrive _was_ a Pioneer
| DVR-1xx rebadged. That 's how I got into them in the first
| place :)
|
| This is also why the Pioneer-branded models work just
| perfectly in Mac OS 9 and every version of Mac OS X with no
| PatchBurn necessary:
| https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/patchburn
| fbnlsr wrote:
| As others said, the only thing you should be looking for is a
| drive that works with Accuraterip. Ripping discs from my
| local library is a hobby of mine and I've discovered so much
| music from there. I still buy CDs from thrift shops and the
| occasional garage sale, but having my music collection neatly
| organized and ripped/verified in FLAC is something I enjoy a
| lot.
| Lammy wrote:
| If you just want to rip audio CDs, pretty much any USB drive
| ever made will be fine. If you want a drive that can do
| everything up to and including UHD BD, try a Pioneer BDR-
| XS07UHD if you like slot loading or a Pioneer BDR-XD07B if
| you need a top-loader with snap-spindle for mini CDs or
| oddly-shaped CDs. These will cost way more than an old
| USB2-era drive but will be brand new.
|
| You might be able to trawl your local thrift store and walk
| out with a $5 external drive from the 2000s, but a drive like
| that should be opened, dusted out, lens cleaned, and rails
| lubricated with some PTFE grease:
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081JE0OO
|
| Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping
| software, and here's how to configure it:
| https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/eac-ripping/
|
| Or XLD if you're on Mac:
| https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/xld-ripping/
| amiga386 wrote:
| > pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine.
|
| This is not the case. Most of the cheap drives on Amazon
| sold by random capital letters people are complete shit. As
| an example, the "CB31005" drive doesn't fucking work. It
| often gets hung up on reading the TOC and won't even admit
| there is a CD in the drive. If it doesn't hang there, it
| reads fine for a while, then at some random point (possibly
| the first point of error) just gives up and fails to read
| sectors, forevermore, until you unplug and replug the
| drive.
|
| Even with EAC (which is indeed very good), it just spends
| hours re-reading sectors up to its maximum number of
| retries, giving up, and inserting silence. Do not buy a
| CB31005.
| Lammy wrote:
| Drat, I didn't realize the six-letter people had gotten
| to optical drives. The cheapest (materially and
| monetarily) I'd previously encountered was like a very
| very cost-reduced LG SATA drive which was $20 but still
| worked perfectly.
| GTP wrote:
| > Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping
| software
|
| What makes it the best? I assumed that, since you're just
| reading digital data, any ripping software would do the
| same job in terms of quality, and the only differences
| would mostly be about having some convenient features or a
| better UI.
| amiga386 wrote:
| CD audio data is indeed lossless data, and has some form
| of spreading the data physically (CIRC), but has limited
| error correction. Data CDs have _more_ error correction
| data than audio CDs, so are more resilient to media
| degradation, scratches, etc.
|
| When CD audio has errors, more often than not, the CD
| drive _conceals_ the error -- it interpolates for this
| unreadable data and doesn 't tell the host. Some drives
| _do_ report C2 errors, but many lie about their
| capabilities, or have poor implementations.
|
| Secondly, when you ask for CD audio, you can't say "give
| me the samples from 00:01:23.567 to 00:49:20.211". You
| can say "seek to 00:01:23.567; start playing; give me the
| audio samples over ATA as you read them". You can also
| say "tell me where you think you are on the disc right
| now". _CD drives do not do this reliably, or give
| reliable answers_. _Exact_ Audio Copy is looking to
| detect this and account for it.
|
| EAC is best used with drives which _reliably_ report
| wrong locations, i.e. are always wrong by a _fixed
| amount_ , and EAC can learn by how much by comparing how
| your drive reports known discs to what's in the
| AccurateRip database.... but EAC can also work with
| drives that are unreliably wrong as well, it just has to
| read the same audio data multiple times over to get a
| good fix on where that audio really is on the CD.
|
| See https://www.accuraterip.com/ for more details of how
| CD drives lie to you and let you down
| timcobb wrote:
| XLD is one of my favorite pieces of software, +1.
| tuyiown wrote:
| Note of caution about others comments that suggests using
| cheap CD drive, audio CDs tracks have no redundancy checks,
| and production of ripping artifacts is directly related to
| the drive raw accuracy.
|
| That said CD seek is so slow that drives cannot really afford
| to rely much on redundancy checks, so maybe this is not of
| concern.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Safest would probably be any drive from the "top drives"
| AccurateRip list here:
| https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/forum/dbpoweramp/cd-
| ripper/3247...
| jim180 wrote:
| I do have this[1] one (product code: 43888 not 43889). Ripped
| a bunch of CDs perfectly.
|
| AFAIK, 43888 is preferred by makemkv forums as it's internal
| drive can be flashed to support ripping blu-rays as well.
|
| [1] https://www.verbatim.com/prod/accessories/disc-drives--
| burne...
| firefax wrote:
| To piggyback, is there a good USB Blu ray drive?
|
| (And is there a known good CLI tool for backing up copies of
| them?)
|
| I have some Blu Rays I worry will be lost to disc rot 20
| years from now...
| HypnoticOcelot wrote:
| I've used the Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD[0] and that's worked well
| with MakeMKV[1]! I've only tried it on normal DVDs, but
| Blu-Rays should work well too.
|
| [0]: https://usa.pioneer/collections/optical-
| drives/products/bdr-...
|
| [1]: https://makemkv.com/
| Lammy wrote:
| In this case you need a drive with firmware older than
| February 2023's v1.03 which disabled MakeMKV's
| LibreDrive. Mine is v1.01. See here:
| https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30383
| HypnoticOcelot wrote:
| Mine was purchased after that date, does that only apply
| to Blu-Ray?
| Lammy wrote:
| Yes, and even then only for Ultra HD Blu-ray. Regular BDs
| should still usually work unless they're uncommon enough
| to not have a title key known to MakeMKV.
|
| "A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc
| drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are
| accessed directly, without any restrictions or
| transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive
| would never refuse to read the data from the disc or
| declare itself 'revoked'. LibreDrive compatible drive is
| required to read UHD discs."
| HypnoticOcelot wrote:
| Thanks, good to know!
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Do you have any advice for burning CD-Rs that will play on old
| players? My Sony CD changer, and the CD players in both cars
| won't play CD-Rs I make. They play CDs fine. I assume it is
| because the lasers have gotten weaker with time and can't read
| the CD-Rs which don't have as much difference between a 1 and 0
| pit compared to stamped CDs? I even ordered Verbatim ones with
| blue azo dye that was supposed to help but still no dice.
| jwrallie wrote:
| Are you burning it as slow as possible? That can help a bit,
| but I'm almost sure you know about it.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Have you tried a different writer?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I've only tried my HHB BurnIT CDR-830, which I love.
|
| https://rapmag.com/a/01/feb01/hhb-burnit-cdr-830-review
|
| I guess it's time to find an old computer CD burner and see
| if those work.
| some-guy wrote:
| I have this problem as well with my 2005 Prius CD player, and
| my 2005 Odyssey's changer before I replaced that car. I think
| only the highest quality CD-Rs written at the lowest possible
| speed is your best bet, but I think there are more variables
| than that.
| quantadev wrote:
| IMO the only way to perfectly protect yourself against Ransomware
| Attacks is with CD-Rs, because it's something not even hardware
| can alter. A skilled take over of the root level of a machine can
| be encrypting everything and you'd never know it, until the day
| it denies your access, by deleting an encryption key until you
| pay up to get it back...you hope.
| berbec wrote:
| i use dropbox
| quantadev wrote:
| Speaking of that...I need to look into online storage
| solutions myself. I mean even a zip file on Google Drive! Not
| doing that currently. I always rotate thru literally 20
| different devices for my backups, but if a meteor hits my
| house it's all gone.
|
| So many non-technical people think "a backup" is enough. I
| learned long ago to keep 20.
| fbnlsr wrote:
| I personally use a hard drive in my house, and a cold
| storage solution (Glacier) from a reputable provider.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I use FTP.
| esafak wrote:
| This would have been a great comment if you were that
| original 'why not use FTP?' guy :)
| t90fan wrote:
| Things like RDX backup cartridges have a physical write protect
| lever on them
|
| A few years ago (before affordable cloud backup offerings) this
| was fairly common for Small Businesses to use, for this reason.
| amelius wrote:
| Only works if the software cannot circumvent it (implemented
| fully in hardware).
| WalterBright wrote:
| Disk drives used to have a write-enable jumper on them. No
| more.
| koolba wrote:
| IIRC, those were more of a suggestion from the drive to
| prevent writing. It didn't actually physically prevent it
| from being overwritten.
| rasz wrote:
| Drives? I havent seen one yet. Floppies yes, but just like SD
| cards its just a plastic piece being read by controller GPIO
| and a mere suggestion to the hardware.
|
| There are forensic Write blockers for drives tho starting at
| around $200 for SATA/IDE solution.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Some of really old SCSI and (I think)IDE HDDs did have "WP"
| jumper positions. I don't know practically how it was
| implemented, though.
| theamk wrote:
| Modern backup systems use reference counting mechanisms, which
| means you can set up any old versions policy you want.
| Something like "last 3 annual backups + last 12 monthly ones +
| last 8 weekly ones + last 30 daily ones" will help a lot
| against slow encryptors.
|
| You'll want to ensure the malware can't destroy your backup,
| but that is possible too. A traditional way is to have a
| separate backup machine that runs backup program and pulls
| files remotely. Some backup apps can store directly to cloud
| storage and can work with "append only" permissions, to ensure
| that client can't delete existing backups. In this
| configuration, a separate trusted machine must run pruning
| periodically.
| freosam wrote:
| That's all true, and probably a better system overall, but
| burning an optical disk, labelling it, and putting it on a
| shelf does feel like a more accessible backup regime for many
| people. :-)
| theamk wrote:
| Fair enough! The danger with disks however is that it's an
| entirely manual operation which is easy to forget.
| Something setup-once-and-forget - local server or a cloud-
| based one like backblaze - is more likely to actually have
| the latest data when you need it.
|
| (Another reason is that the disks do bit rot however, and
| you'll never know until it's too late. Meanwhile, my ZFS
| fileserver sends me a email every weekend that it's
| scrubbed all the disks and found no errors - this warms my
| heart :) )
| quantadev wrote:
| And what they say in the industries that need to take this
| ultra seriously (Banking and Insurance companies, for
| example) an untested backup is not considered a good backup.
| And the only way to truly test a backup is install a fresh
| image of the entire OS (using checksums on the image too), so
| that you can read the data and make sure no clever ransome-
| ware software is secretly encrypting EVEN your backups.
|
| oh, btw. "Blockchains solve this" haha.
| theamk wrote:
| Well, yeah.. you never want to test backups on the same
| computer you made them, so to test them, you should go to
| secondary/friends/work computer and try to access the
| files. Boot from a fresh LiveUSB stick if you are feeling
| paranoid. At least once you have backup configured, there
| is often a fuse driver, so an easy way to do so is to
| browse backups and try to open a few documents at random.
|
| As for "encrypting your backups", that's what the "check"
| command is for - it can't ensure that this .py file
| actually contains python code (and not encrypted data with
| ransomware message), but it can check that indices are
| well-formed, and file checksums match the uploaded
| contents. Obviously it should also be run on trusted
| machine.
|
| Not sure what this whole "blockchain" comment was about.
| quantadev wrote:
| That's a great idea about using just a LiveUSB thumb
| drive. Much better than my idea of actually "installing"
| a fresh OS.
|
| The blockchain I mentioned was just a reference to the
| fact that with hashcodes on everything make corruptions
| at least detectable, but yeah it wasn't clear what I
| meant.
| ryao wrote:
| What about DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs?
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Or BD-Rs. 50GB on a single dual layer disc. Haven't finished
| the last spindle I bought, but I assume they're the cheapest
| per GB by now.
| pronoiac wrote:
| Checking diskprices.com - https://diskprices.com/?locale=us
| &condition=new,used&disk_ty... - there's a cheaper outlier
| for DVD-R, then it's 25GB BD-Rs for a bit.
|
| LTO tape can be cheaper, but the cost of the drives has
| long been an obstacle to dabbling.
| megous wrote:
| Yeah, the prices don't seem to be correct. New 16TB HDD
| for $200. DVD+R 25x pack for $2, etc. Clicking the links
| shows different prices on amazon, etc.
| Dwedit wrote:
| You don't need to worry about _ransomware_ destroying the
| data on your writable DVDs, the discs themselves can do that
| fine.
| fbnlsr wrote:
| Yeah disc rot is a real problem. CD/DVD-R are great when it
| comes to physically store drives (they don't take much
| space on a shelf and are easely sent via mail) but I'd
| rather use a hard drive and the cloud for my backups now.
| daneel_w wrote:
| The problem goes away if you burn slow, no faster than
| half the disc's max speed, to adequately affect the dye.
| I have CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that are 20 years old and work
| great. Inherent rot is mainly a problem with pressed
| discs which use aluminum instead of silver or gold for
| the reflective layer.
| quantadev wrote:
| I burn my CD-Rs at a very low speed, like someone else
| mentioned below, so the laser does a better burn. I don't
| use CD-Rs as primary backup. I have 10 external hard
| drives, 20 thumb drives, and do a CD-R only once every
| couple of weeks. I just feel better having multiple
| different hardware devices used.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Can a CD-R drive force a second pass burning over existing data
| to make the disc unusable? Perhaps with drive firmware
| modification.
| rasz wrote:
| Afaik you can "erase" contents of a disk with open session.
| Data is still there just invisible without specialized tools,
| enough to fool non nerds.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| It would be safer to use a read-only drive when reading back
| the backups.
| somat wrote:
| With regards to the first one described the TDK with the UV
| guard, I am curious as to what that is. My guess is it has more
| to do with avoiding UV related damage than blocking UV.
|
| I am not sure the authors spectrometer test(which was very cool,
| avidly reading that series of articles right now) would reveal
| anything as polycarbonate is naturally quite opaque to uv light.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate#/media/File:Visi...
| Note how the transmission is dramatically reduced once past
| violet.
|
| Fun fact ordinary clear polycarbonate eyeglasses do just as good
| a job as sun glasses at protecting your eyes from uv.
| MelodyUwU wrote:
| CD-Rs are great, especially taiyo yuden
| netrap wrote:
| Out of business for awhile now.. I'd guess 90% or more CD-Rs
| made now are CMC. Ritek might still make some. There is also
| falconrak in UAE making them. At this point I am curious if
| anyone in Japan is still doing it... Does Memory-Tech in japan
| make recordable media??
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| To be clear, Taiyo Yuden sold their patents and manuf
| equipment to CMC Magnetics in Taiwan.
|
| I never heard of Falcon Tech Int'l before today. I found info
| about their CD-Rs/DVD-Rs here:
| https://falconrak.com/product/products-matrix-2/
| ndiddy wrote:
| Taiyo Yuden sold their process and tooling to CMC, and
| they're now sold as "CMC Pro" discs. I previously used JVC
| branded Japanese Taiyo Yuden discs. I switched to CMC Pro
| when I ran out, and haven't noticed any difference in
| quality.
| Lammy wrote:
| Great choice with the Pioneer DVR-111. They're my favorite series
| of drives ever. NEC ND-3500 chipset; Pioneer mechanism.
|
| Pioneer publish the approved media list for their drives but it's
| not really detailed enough since it only lists by manufacturer
| while the firmware is operating on manufacturer plus media code:
| https://www.mfdigital.com/downloads/Pioneer%20111%20approved...
|
| You can potentially get better results by patching your discs
| into your drive's firmware using MediaCodeSpeedEdit:
| https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/
| unwind wrote:
| Yes, of course there is software to patch firmware of "ancient"
| optical drives in order to support media that wasn't supported
| at the time of manufacture. Of course. Sometimes, I actually
| love 2025 a little bit. Thanks.
| Lammy wrote:
| 2004-2011 actually :)
|
| https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/changelog.txt
|
| > 1.1.0.8 14 Oct 2007 -- added read speed patch for PIONEER
| DVD-RW DVR-111/112/212 drives, increasing +/-R read speed
| from 12x to 16x, +/-DL/RW from 8x to 12x. This patch is not
| available for 109/110 drives because 16x/12x is a bit too
| fast for smooth reading on these drives.
|
| > 1.1.0.1 01 May 2007 -- added RPC1 patch for DVR-111 and
| DVR-112 firmwares, added flasher patch allowing downgrade and
| 'same to same' flashing for DVR-111 and DVR-112 firmware
| flasher
|
| > 1.0.8.18 10 Sep 2006 -- added support for PIONEER DVR-111D
| 1.29, DVR-111 1.29
|
| > 1.0.8.17 18 Jul 2006 -- added support for Pioneer (Buffalo)
| DVR-111D 8.25, DVR-111L 8.26
| linsomniac wrote:
| One thing that really stuck out to me in the write speed graphs
| is the dropouts in the speed. The Maxell seemed to be the only
| one that didn't have them.
|
| Back in the day my company had a regionally-slightly-popular
| Linux distro. Every couple months we'd burn 500-700 discs. We
| were small enough that it didn't make sense to mass produce, so
| we burned them ourselves.
|
| We would occasionally get reports from people of being unable to
| read the discs, and so we went through ~6 months of
| investigation, test shipping to relatives, paying our customers
| to ship the discs back so we could check them.
|
| Eventually I found that while every disc would validate by
| checksum of the entire disc (part of our burn process), if I
| tracked the time required to read every block, the discs that
| people had problems with would tend to have some spikes in the
| time it took to read some blocks. The drives we were using would
| read them, sometimes taking an amazingly long time to do so (like
| 30 minutes instead of 2), but users drives would just fail them.
|
| Eventually I wrote a new validation process that in addition to
| the checksum used the timing information as well to determin if
| the disc failed, and at that point our failures in the field
| basically went to 0.
|
| But, we got really sensitive to vendors of discs. Basically it
| was Taiyo Yuden or nothing. Some big brands would give us 20%
| failures to burn, where Taiyo Yuden was <1%.
| lifeofguenter wrote:
| was this maybe an issue with the cd-writer? maybe at the speeds
| it was writing with?
| linsomniac wrote:
| I mean maybe, we had a few different models we burned with,
| but only a few. With the volume we needed to burn, we needed
| the speed. But, as a counter-point, I will say that with
| Taiyo Yuden discs our failures were very low, so the drives
| were only a component. IIRC we were using a lot of LiteOn
| drives which at the time were not bad.
| banqjls wrote:
| It's sad how Japanese brand names went from "sign of quality"
| to "basically non existent"
| zerocrates wrote:
| > Taiyo Yuden or nothing
|
| I remember this being my basic rule of thumb for buying
| writable DVDs, though for... home usage, nothing approaching
| your scale.
| smeeger wrote:
| where is he buying these discs?
| ksec wrote:
| I will take this opportunity and ask. Are there any special CD /
| DVD player where it could better read very old disk?
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I had PILES of CD-R and CD-RW from the turn of the century that
| are coasters now. Stored in the dry and dark...just absolutely
| unreadable.
|
| Oddly, the photo CDs I got professionally written were great.
| rbanffy wrote:
| A durability test would be an interesting future article. I need
| to dig up my old backups and check how readable they are now.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I have CD-Rs from decades ago that are fine... but I always used
| the whatever the Library of Congress used for archival purposes
| (they were the pricey dual layer gold ones from Verbatim)
| some-guy wrote:
| Same here, but I have since re-backed them up to "cold" spare
| internal hard drives I have lying around that remain unplugged,
| in addition to my NAS storage. I just cannot trust them.
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(page generated 2025-04-02 23:01 UTC)