CD-R burnout


As an old fart about ready for retirement, this little ditty appeared in the latest AARP magazine, dated March 2006:
"Popular CD-R and CD-RW discs used to "burn" digital photographs, videos, and songs for the long haul seem to have a crucial short-coming, says an IBM information storage expert: The discs, unlike pressed compact discs used for professionally produced music and video recordings, typically last only two to five years.

Physicist Kurt Gerecke says heat can degrade the recording surface of burned CD's, which makes the stored data "unreadable" by laser beams. His advice: Store photos and other keepsake data on magnetic tape, which can last 30 years. Or they can be archived on a computer hard drive with a high-quality disk bearing and a disk with 7,200 revolutions per minute"

What think you, Audiogonners', about this news?
sid42

Showing 1 response by brb9

I have Cd's from the mid-80's that are disintregrating. Here are some fun articles:

http://news.scotsman.com/entertainment.cfm?id=553612004

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/bronzed.asp

Also a lot of cheap CD-R's have extremely thin protective layers over the data layer and so must be handled with extreme care.