Losing sleep over sharpie damaging discs?

[windtrader]

It's been awhile since the discussions of sharpie writing causing damage on discs.

I keep doing it and have not experienced any playback issues that seem related to the use of sharpies.

Has anyone out there experienced playback issues you thing are created by sharpies? Are you writing in silver tops, preprinted logo tops, writable tops?

[Happygolucky]

Originally posted by windtrader
It's been awhile since the discussions of sharpie writing causing damage on discs.

I keep doing it and have not experienced any playback issues that seem related to the use of sharpies.

Has anyone out there experienced playback issues you thing are created by sharpies? Are you writing in silver tops, preprinted logo tops, writable tops?

I've always written on my discs with a black Sharpie fine point. Data CDs, VCDs, SVCDs, and now DVDs. Never experienced any problem with them. I've always used writeable top blanks (usually the logo with lines for writing).

[atreides93]

For important stuff, I use the finepoint sharpie and write on the hub. Why take the risk...but for stuff I won't die if I lose, I'll write to the label side of the disk.

[windtrader]

Writing on the hub may present problems of its own since that is the surface where the drive clamps. I don't think a sharpie will leave reside that would begin to build up or create any slippage but it is one more thing to wonder about - same as how much ink penetrates and how far into the media.

Here's a link that shows the two .6mm substrates. On a DVD-R, for the ink to affect the burned reflective material it would have to penetrate the .6mm substrate and the bonding layer. Seems like a lot of material for the ink to go through.

The only thing about this info is is really specific to DVD-5, so DVD-R may have a different spec.

http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/dvdintro/dvd_formats.htm

An experiment is in order! Will report back.

UPDATE - I took a knife and scrapped off the sharpie writing to see how deep it had penetratrated the top polycarbonate substrate. On the Ritek silver top/ purple dye G03 and G04, there is actually a surface coating that give the satin look. Underneath that coating is the actual polycarbonate substrate. The sharpie was completely gone by the time I scrapped off the surface coating. The polycarbonate is very dense and was quite hard to scratch or dig into. I did not see any sharpie ink getting to or residing on the polycarbonate layer.

Knowing there is at least another .5mm to go before any damage could occur, its seems sharpie ink will not cause any kind of permanent damange to the disc long term.