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Re: [ARSCLIST] The ways CD's and DVD's can fail.



Hi Mike:

One would be foolish to disagree with your recommendation. One happy circumstance with our 7-burner tower at work is that although all drives involved claim to be "52x", burning rarely takes place faster than 24x due to what must be limits of keeping the data traffic flowing smoothly. Actually, I don't think any burner I own can actually burn a disc at 52x, so it's a mute speed claim. For audio CD's, I keep burning to 16x as that has resulted in zero coasters in 17+ months and counting (since I switched to T-Y blue dye discs for everyday applications and Mitsui Gold for archival/master applications -- but an occasional foray into name-brand green-dye bought on sale at Staples has not resulted in coasters either).

I guess my point is, I have found most CDR media pretty reliable in the relatively short time I've used it. I hope we can revisit this question in 25 and 50 years. I should note that few tapes age wonderfully over 50 years either and I have some 25-year-old tapes that are very degraded. So perhaps the best rule of thumb is, freshen your content once every X=low number of years.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Richter" <mrichter@xxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 9:52 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] The ways CD's and DVD's can fail.



Tom Fine wrote:
Larry Miller, former Ampex electrical engineer/designer and one who has sat on several networking protocol standards committees, has written extensively on the Ampex list about error correction and the robustness of error correction protocols. I believe it is unrealistic to expect too low an error rate in burned dye media, but the error-correction has proven very robust over time. Not to say a trashed disc is not a trashed disc, but to say we should not make too much of tiny errors that are easily corrected and accepted in the protocols just because we can detect them.

-- Tom Fine

I have little disagreement with what you offer, but do note that there appears to be strong correlation between substantial initial error rate and rapid degradation. I have guesses on the causes, but insufficient data to go further than to establish the rules for myself. In a similar vein, low initial error rates seem to correlate positively with easy readability. Again, one can speculate on the causes, but it may be enough simply to use reasonably minimized errors as a selection criterion for media - along with cost, availability and other factors.


At the least, I recommend to all that burning be limited to speeds near that which gives the fewest errors.

Mike
--
mrichter@xxxxxxx
http://www.mrichter.com/



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