What explains my good luck with RW discs?

[LightWorker01]

I have posted here a few years ago about these, and recently went back to some and actually watched one in the DVD player (a PS2) last night to show my partner a particular boat trip I went on. Some of these discs are now approaching 15+ years old and read perfectly with no bad sectors when attempting to read (not even correctable ones). I have had no issues with any RW media I have used actually reading a long time later, both Verbatim and Sony discs (I stuck to these pretty much exclusively as even my teenage self had looked up archival brands and had settled on Verbatim). I have seen lesser discs last half this time (and verbatim BD-XL discs beginning to fail after only 5 years, a far cry from the experience I had with Azo discs)

As it's not WORM I seldom use them apart from an offline dataset of my documents folder as this needs periodic updating but I have a couple of legacy ones in my collection or for testing a movie burn before wasting an R disc.

I thought they were meant to be less-stable, but it seems that the tellrium data layer of these may not always break down in a quality disc in a *temperate climate!*, but you lose the WORM property. Never had one become unreadable apart from one that had a few damaged sectors from horrendous storage and handling conditions. I have some Sony R discs from the 2006 era as well, and those are SONY. No failing sectors, reads as though it was burned yesterday.

One caveat is most of these I had luck with were burned on no more than a couple of times, I haven't got any I torture tested.

[lordsmurf]

RW can be good for a long time, or fail after 1 use. That goes for both quality JVC/MKM/TDK/SONY/etc RW discs, not just CMC/PRINCO/etc type junk media.

Some of my JVC have been reused dozens of times in the past 20 years, still going strong.
Some of my TDK and SONY have failed eventually.

If you use RW once, then it can be very R-like (-R,+R, the write-once) in how it performs.

RW are vastly less compatible with optical lasers that write-once, so the drive use to play/read will have some affect.

WORM? Write-once -R/+R media?

What you have experienced is really not that unusual. Optical media can last decades, it's the readers/players that often fail in under 5 years. In 100 years, we'll have lots of discs, but all will be Frisbies and coasters, because we'll have nothing to view/read them with!

[LightWorker01]

Thanks for your response I actually followed many of your posts as a silent viewer for many years and I appreciate the advice you shared over the years so thanks

And yeah I like optical for its WORM quality and that has actually come in useful in a case of me deleting a directory recently that also was wiped from my backups over time. Seems id accidentally kept a folder in this directory that wasn't really supposed to be there but elsewhere on my data set (user error) and it took the WORM characteristics of archived data to get the files back. I considered that directory 'useless' and id have wiped it from every dataset not realising what was within (which is exactly what I did). WORM safeguarded against that error that "it was important to me once!"

Interesting the variability of how quickly some of them can fail whatever the brand. Also I can imagine the UKs climate is quite mild compared to say the Philippines where I have bought a cakebox of life series by accident for throw away game disc data that had gone bad out of the box.

Id agree about finding players in a century (I won't be around to worry about it), though as they are still made I expect at least two decades and still see many older players performing quite well (I have a 2003 PS2 that is regularly used for DVD movies and playback of Azo discs). Strangely enough it also reads RW discs, and PS2s were known not to have the best lasers (though I think my 5000x model has one of the best lasers in the line up). But some older equipment (my 1990s stereo system sometimes skips on RW CDs).

Strangely enough, its the only format I can take round any friend's house and know it will play without effort in a games consoles or round elderly family with a DVD player. Have seen too many unfortunate cases of me trying to play files on someone else's equipment who have not installed VLC on their PC and thus no HEVC playback in windows out of the box or their console may not read a particular brand of USB stick or their system lags when trying to play back 4K video files. But the DVD of a social hangout 5 years ago or 1 year ago, I put it in, hit play and it works in every house. Plus we like a physical keepsake with case and disc art of key events in my social group.

I keep all the files on my NAS and in several places anyway, but I do like physical media as its also a tangible object tying us back to the event that day. I just keep to single layer discs.

The current games console generation has some lifecycle left with a DVD drive, though I wonder if the PS6 will and I can get the USB drives at a big box store still, so I expect at least a few decades of being able to get players. Probably the only standard I saw spread so far! I still buy boxsets and films that I really like on DVD simply because I 'own' it, spend less per month than I would if I subscribed to Netflix and its cheaper to support new movies this way and the quality seems to be more than good enough in my house and it looks nice on the shelf with the art. Someone I have not seen in ages came round the other day and loved picking up the cases and reading the art of choosing a movie to watch. Or I take a punt on a cheap movie I have not seen from a charity shop.

[lordsmurf]

I have a closet filled with VHS and DVDs, and some other formats. Eventually, I'll toss/resell/recycle it all, but not today, and not in my near-term plans. We are moving to a "cloud" world, and that can include your own private HDDs/clouds. Only the rarest, and most important, will be kept as physical media copies.

I'm in process of scanning all the family 35mm photos, after searching for a good scanner for about 2 years (ix100 is quite good, especially for a non-flatbed CIS ADF/feeder). There's just too many to flatbed scan, as I did with all the Polaroids and fragile prints. The 35mm scans look better than the 80s-00s prints do, and I have the negatives, so no real need to keep the smelly glossy sticky paper in a closet. (I'm not scanning the negatives for all these prints, way too slow.)

I need to reduce clutter in my life, and "going digital" is allowing it, without need to lose/sacrifice the content.

And I say this as somebody that was deeply into optical media.

I still have unburned 1st class DVD media, and should probably consider selling some of it, and my inventory of high-quality Amaray cases. But it won't be for a clearance price, none of it exists anymore, not for 10-20 years now. It's not the junk you find online now.

We cut the cord (my decision), and currently have a few streamers. (Not Netflix, too expensive, not great content.) Overall, it's a better deal than buying physical media. As I wrote elsewhere recently, there is so much content out there now, that I rarely watch anything more than once anymore. So owning new/more physical discs has lost it's appeal for me.

[LightWorker01]

I think I can agree with you on a lot of this; for you, it makes total sense especially if you only watch stuff once. And there is the whole aspect of 'more and more things and clutter'. The VHS tapes I got rid of ages ago for this reason, only keeping a few home movie tapes of the most critical times just because an additional backup is worth it. And often when we watch those, we do insert the original tape just because I know its captured in high quality on my NAS and library but it's the experience of the time period it was recorded in.

For me I don't seek enough new content on TV that I actually spend less on DVDs of what I really found I like than paying monthly for the streaming subscriptions. I tend to sign up once a year occasionally to find new content, and if there is something I really like that I watched there, I usually like to rewatch over and over in a timespan of years that I find it justifies the cost of purchasing it physically. Sometimes I get decent content for next to nothing of a movie viewed once and then ditched in a charity shop.

I do not trust the cloud hosted by someone else really though do have the best photos backed up in google photos and opt to save myself the subscription cost on other services even with zero knowledge encryption; but I do keep encrypted HDDs off-site at friends' that I rotate of my NAS and do daily on-site backups, I find my own private NAS is what I use plus it's much faster than an outside 'cloud' and if I found myself without internet, no biggie. Same with my music collection, it is locally on my NAS and on my phone.

My negatives I used a Nikon Coolscan but that took a lot of time, but the photos in question were part of my teen years! Sounds like you handled those the right way, I was lucky that I only really shot what I intended to print in the darkroom. I like physical photo albums of the best photos and I recently went over all my photographs digitally and found many were not even worth my time, and kept only those I know I would view again and potentially print. I got my entire dataset down in size this way this way!

I think reducing life clutter is important. As far as owning a load of DVDs go We probably own a few boxsets on DVD and about 40 movies shelf size, again stuff we would repeatedly watch. Plus there is the physical side of guests coming over and physically handling it and reading it wanting something to watch. That fits with how me and my social group like to do things, as it gives an 'offline' social experience. A lot of other DVDs are just kept in small DVD wallets so don't take up an awful lot of space.

We don't tend to watch a lot of new content, but if it is really good I like a physical copy to supplement the NAS. I do like and still play LAN with a lot of friends on retro consoles like the PS2/3 as they are still games we enjoy playing, and a CRT is our main TV. I owned a 4K HDTV, and when it begun to give issues just out of warranty related to its firmware. I went back to a free tube TV id been given and just didn't bother looking back as it just keeps working and to be honest has a great picture. Prefer the skin tones on it both me and my partner and we get the blacks of OLED, without its price on a TV i fear probably would break down in a few years. The DVDs are more convenient with this set up though I can use the PS3 to stream from the NAS if required (it does output RGB natively). The small HDTV we have is usually only bought out at LAN parties as an extra screen.

But for taking a movie elsewhere that may or may not be on a streaming service, or of a social event of friends to play on their TV which happens quite often in my life, DVDs were the only thing that we could spend no time popping it in and hitting 'play' and getting it to work every time. Far less set-up time! I found their consoles or media center often did not like my hard drive of movies or need it to be formatted in just the right way.

Google photos does a photobooks option that can squeeze a lot of ones life photos into physical books. A wonderful compromise between digital data and a printed album as it takes far less space.

If you did want to sell that media, there are plenty of buyers who would pay for it, I actually have bought quite a bit of media this way. There is a LOT of junk media online

-- merged --

An interesting development. I just tested some CMC MAG AM3 discs that I burned 16 years ago. My sister dug them out of an old box, these were stored in some quite damp/humid conditions without cases and the discs were dirty, some light scratches. A wipe down and an attempt to read them, they read faithfully at full speed, no damaged (yellow) or unreadable (red) blocks in Nero Disc Speed. Now I store them far better than then.

Seems the biggest issues I found I have faced with the 2nd tier discs were noticed at the time the discs were burned/failing to verify but those that successfully burned seem to be good, it was around 2010 I switched to verbatim from whatever discs I could buy but have some of the legacy ones in my collection mostly CMC.

The BD-XL 100GB non M Disc Verbatim discs on the other hand have started to decay badly after only 6 years with multiple bad/uncorrectable blocks, but I wonder if I got a bad batch. Out of 4, 2 were fine and 2 just had constant errors across large swathes of the discs. I suspect 3 layers and far more density leaves little wiggle room for error. I did however notice banding on blu ray discs after burning yet the burns verified fine at the time, so I wonder if they were marginally or badly burned at the time. Single layer ones burned at the same time are still good.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LightWorker01

Seems the biggest issues I found I have faced with the 2nd tier discs were noticed at the time the discs were burned/failing to verify but those that successfully burned seem to be good, it was around 2010 I switched to verbatim from whatever discs I could buy but have some of the legacy ones in my collection mostly CMC.

Correct.

Quote:

The BD-XL 100GB non M Disc Verbatim discs on the other hand have started to decay badly after only 6 years with multiple bad/uncorrectable blocks, but I wonder if I got a bad batch.

A "batch" of media is about 100,000 discs. QC tends to recycle those pre-consumer.

The whole "bad batch" idea is a myth perpetuated by low-knowledge members of the long-gone cdfreaks.com (later myce.com). It was the "head canon" BS that they told themselves to feel better about buying cheap crap media. The most onerous examples were CMC, PRINCO, RITEKG04, and fake media. Garbage was labeled "bad batch", and excuses made to feel better about their lousy purchases.

Quote:

Out of 4, 2 were fine and 2 just had constant errors across large swathes of the discs. I suspect 3 layers and far more density leaves little wiggle room for error. I did however notice banding on blu ray discs after burning yet the burns verified fine at the time, so I wonder if they were marginally or badly burned at the time. Single layer ones burned at the same time are still good.

BD (and thus BD-R) construction is also inverse CD, and the data layers are therefore not sandwiched. That in itself is why so many Blu-ray discs (either pressed or burned) have failed at a higher rate than DVD. Sony "won" the BD/HD-DVD war by bribery, and the actual better format (HD-DVD) failed. They were afraid of a Beta/VHS repeat. The HD-DVD consortium simply did not have as big of pockets. Sad but true. In the end, Sony's crappy format killed off all optical media.

[LightWorker01]

Glad to see my train of thought is the right one with the 2nd Tier media and my experience matches what is here.

And yeah id have thought batches were far bigger, and a problem with 1 batch id have expected on several other spindles or media from said batch for the reasons you describe. Though in this case I selected what I believed to be the best media.

The inverse CD did concern me a bit about blu ray, and it seems now I have actually used blu rays and did those test burns those years ago to see if it will hold up, it makes me want to stick to DVD for optical even though its capacity is lower. Probably sone of the only media in recent years I have used that properly got bad in the time after being burned and I only selected them due to the size of the library. I can imagine the handling of those must be with kid gloves and then some. I guess CD may have a similar issue but far larger 'size' of each burned pit would probably make it far less vulnerable than blu-ray might be.

As we all know Sony liked to do proprietary formats, the PS3 helped give them the leverage on top of their deep pockets. Strangely enough they did that with the PS2 and DVD.

Interesting also is that you mention about pressed blu rays also failing as I have seen some reports of that on forums.

It's actually one thing that's put me off owning movies on blu-ray over DVD because of the risk of decay and say the Blu Ray boxset of Once Upon a Time one of our favourite shows may go for £79 versus getting it for £45 on DVD. Now you have mentioned it and pointed out pressed ones as well, I think I made the best choice by sticking to DVD for my optical needs.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LightWorker01

, the PS3 helped give them the leverage on top of their deep pockets. Strangely enough they did that with the PS2 and DVD.

PS3 almost ended Sony's foray into video games, as the console lost them billions of dollars. It never made a profit, and the PS3 games only barely broke even as the PS4 came out. (Console = loss leader, games = profit driver. And the "break even" was reported multiple times, for years, but the number revisions kept kicking the can.)

PS3 had very little to do with Blu-ray, as some seem to falsely think. The real difference for Blu-ray came from direct bribery to studios, to form a consortium, and to even woo over HD-DVD members. Toshiba also tried to bribe to HD-DVD, but Sony had deeper pockets at the time.

PS2 for DVD, and PS3 for BD, really had negligible effects. Videos games didn't matter to the vast majority of households that wanted to watch/own/rent movies. The game system was in junior's room, the TV for movies was in the living room for mom/dad/family. It's as ridiculous as the false revisionist myth that porn decided the VHS vs. Beta format war. Often repeated, always wrong.

DRM was also a factor, the BD was far more draconian than HD-DVD, and studios loved that.

[LightWorker01]

I appreciate the corrections on that. It's quite a commonly believed myth especially in the gaming community. I myself had a PS2 as my first DVD player (and is still used as such) and wowed my mother when she offered to buy me one as a gift

I do know the PS3 made them lose a lot of money which is why they removed the EE+GS chip for PS2 compatibility in later revisions (though first when it was released to the EU, they removed the EE and just included a GS chip and offloaded the EE functions to software emulation. I had a release day model for a long time and it was good to play PS2 games on the HDTV I had at the time. Didn't help also it was super hard to program for in its architecture.

So it was a case of who could pay the deeper bribe only from what you are saying, aka sony And yeah I can imagine they loved its harder DRM. Its a shame they are not archivally strong as DVD because the quality of a movie on Blu-ray was always excellent and it would have made a great archival copy of stuff you enjoyed. I do know sony offer archive cartridges which contain several 128GB blu-ray discs, I can imagine as they are not handled by hands its less likely the sensitive close to the bottom data layer would be damaged.

DVDs on the other hand, I have subjected some to torture tests such as bending, stepping on them and bending them a little, throwing them and still finding they could read perfectly fine with no errors. Scratches would make them unreadable with enough, but buffing them out rendered it readable. They were actually not easy to accidentally break/crack.