Tinkle Pit
6th November 2006, 00:22
The fear of God has been placed in my heart. :scared:
The media vendors had told me that their DVD-R/CD-R products would last over a century after burning. And I believed them. I have been burning CDs and DVDs for over five years, in just about every format possible, thinking that I was archiving my precious data for a lifetime.
And now my old CDs are dieing. Several which were readable have become unreadable. No scratches. No fingerprints. Kept in a reasonable environment. But they are dieing.
Further research indicated that while "pressed" optical media (originals from the publishers) may have a lifetime in the decades, burned media with organic dyes has a much lower life expectancy - possibly as short as two years for cheaper media.
I felt hopeless. Despair came upon me. I was doomed. :scared:
But I shook myself out of it and girded my loins to fight against that greatest of all foes, Entropy. :sly:
I have launched a multi-pronged attack, but the battle which is of interest to this forum is the high-quality DVD burn. I am taking my entire CD/DVD collection, ripping to an iso or similar image, compressing, and collecting them into high quality DVDs.
I am then using Nero's CD/DVD Speed to rate the quality of the burn. I write the Quality value, the PE Failure average and the date on the DVD. Each year I will be able to re-run the quality check and watch the degradation, hopefully catching it before the disk is unreadable and making a fresh copy.
The project will take a while, possibly a couple of years, since I estimate well over a terabyte is at risk. But in a few years HDDVD-R should be reliable enough to use and I will be able to lower the disk count even further. This will make it easier to perform an anual health check.
Please correct my if I am wrong, but I am under the impression that the higher quality media, and higher quality burns, should last longer than poor quality. I am not concerned with speed. I burn at the slowest speed possible to improve the quality. I am not totally concerned with cost and am willing to pay reasonably more for burner and media if there is a significant improvement in quality.
So my question to this forum is...
Which media give the highest quality burn and...
Which burners give the highest quality burn?
For DVD media I have had the best results with Verbatim followed by HP. FujiFilm and TDK have been only fair and Ritek has been crap. Anyone know of anything better? Any fancy, professional brands which I might not know about? Or any brands which will let me burn slower than 2x?
For the burner, I was using a NEC 3550a with great results. I was burning Verbatims with a quality rating of 97 and a PE failure avarage of less than 0.01. But after a few thousand disks it quit working. I got another NEC 3550a, but it hasn't performed nearly as well. The better media is still better, but the numbers are much worse with Verbatim now getting quality ratings of 40 and less.
Can anyone reccomend a better burner? Again, it isn't speed or price, it is the quality of the final burn as measured by CD/DVD Speed.
For that matter, does anyone have a better way of measuring the burn quality?
Thanks in advance for your help!
The media vendors had told me that their DVD-R/CD-R products would last over a century after burning. And I believed them. I have been burning CDs and DVDs for over five years, in just about every format possible, thinking that I was archiving my precious data for a lifetime.
And now my old CDs are dieing. Several which were readable have become unreadable. No scratches. No fingerprints. Kept in a reasonable environment. But they are dieing.
Further research indicated that while "pressed" optical media (originals from the publishers) may have a lifetime in the decades, burned media with organic dyes has a much lower life expectancy - possibly as short as two years for cheaper media.
I felt hopeless. Despair came upon me. I was doomed. :scared:
But I shook myself out of it and girded my loins to fight against that greatest of all foes, Entropy. :sly:
I have launched a multi-pronged attack, but the battle which is of interest to this forum is the high-quality DVD burn. I am taking my entire CD/DVD collection, ripping to an iso or similar image, compressing, and collecting them into high quality DVDs.
I am then using Nero's CD/DVD Speed to rate the quality of the burn. I write the Quality value, the PE Failure average and the date on the DVD. Each year I will be able to re-run the quality check and watch the degradation, hopefully catching it before the disk is unreadable and making a fresh copy.
The project will take a while, possibly a couple of years, since I estimate well over a terabyte is at risk. But in a few years HDDVD-R should be reliable enough to use and I will be able to lower the disk count even further. This will make it easier to perform an anual health check.
Please correct my if I am wrong, but I am under the impression that the higher quality media, and higher quality burns, should last longer than poor quality. I am not concerned with speed. I burn at the slowest speed possible to improve the quality. I am not totally concerned with cost and am willing to pay reasonably more for burner and media if there is a significant improvement in quality.
So my question to this forum is...
Which media give the highest quality burn and...
Which burners give the highest quality burn?
For DVD media I have had the best results with Verbatim followed by HP. FujiFilm and TDK have been only fair and Ritek has been crap. Anyone know of anything better? Any fancy, professional brands which I might not know about? Or any brands which will let me burn slower than 2x?
For the burner, I was using a NEC 3550a with great results. I was burning Verbatims with a quality rating of 97 and a PE failure avarage of less than 0.01. But after a few thousand disks it quit working. I got another NEC 3550a, but it hasn't performed nearly as well. The better media is still better, but the numbers are much worse with Verbatim now getting quality ratings of 40 and less.
Can anyone reccomend a better burner? Again, it isn't speed or price, it is the quality of the final burn as measured by CD/DVD Speed.
For that matter, does anyone have a better way of measuring the burn quality?
Thanks in advance for your help!