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Re:Sony and Panasonic announce the Archival Disc format by hga on Monday March 10, 2014 @09:40AM (#7372810)
Sounds like you were using bad media, at least for CD-Rs (DVD recordable media pushes the technology too far and is inherently less reliable). Unless they're Made in Japan Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs, which cost around 25 cents per disk last time I bought a bunch a few years ago, or maybe Mitsui/MAM-A media, I would expect those sorts of problems. For DVD recordable media, nothing but Mitsui/MAM-A Gold is worth trying.

I've never had an unrecoverable error with Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs. I just recently pulled 8 out of cold storage with no problems aside from one marginal DVD-R drive, that were burned from 7/13/04 to various dates in 2008. If you want I can check from earlier in the decade, although my first batch of discs were Kodak Gold. I systematically burned and carefully stored about 4,000 during the last decade so I've got a lot to choose from ^_^.

Re:Sony and Panasonic announce the Archival Disc format by arbitrage on Monday March 10, 2014 @01:25PM (#7374294)
Wait, so you had no problems at all, except for the problems you did have, which apparently work out to something like a 12% failure rate over 6-10 years?

That's not really a great endorsement.

Re:Sony and Panasonic announce the Archival Disc format by hga on Monday March 10, 2014 @02:07PM (#7374608)
No. Right now I have one marginal Sony Optiarc AD-7260S-0B DVD drive bought back in August 2011. By simply not using that drive, e.g. a 2007 Pioneer DVD drive, or a new "Samsung", my media has always read fine.

OK, the blanket "I've never had an unrecoverable error" is not true if include "on every drive I've tried them on", but then again this is the only drive that's ever started failing on me before it was replaced in the normal course of events. So my success rate in getting my data back without serious recovery efforts, over 14 years minus 5 months, is 100%. But I should go check some of those oldest disks again, it's been a year or two since I've retrieved stuff from the very early oughts.

I don't consider this to be a big thing, given these are commodity consumer drives which will continue to be manufactured to read CDs for the foreseeable future, especially compared to tape, where bad drives are known to eat them and they don't have one old format frozen in time (granted, CD-Rs are less reflective than pressed CDs)....