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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

I have many degraded CDs and DVDs from 2000-2010. No drive would read them. Most from reputable brands. Most non-RW. All stored in dark places, indoors.

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I have many degraded CDs from 1998-2010. In 2019 almost all of them would read, eventually, even as metal flakes came off the disks. I recovered most data from most. My CD-Rs were a mix of brands, nothing special or expensive. But my CD-drives are old too, from 2006(?) or so. I wonder if like with floppy disks and drives, modern CD drives are less capable than old ones because they're no longer a premium product?

> I wonder if like with floppy disks and drives, modern CD drives are less capable than old ones because they're no longer a premium product?

When I ripped CDs I had from the 00s in 2019, I used an external Blu-ray drive from probably 2018 or so. Seemed to work okay; see [0]. I didn't have access to anything older so I can't compare but I think both new and old drives are probably good.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30889474

Blu-ray discs use a red laser, and CD-ROMs use an infrared laser. The drives contain two laser diodes. Skip to 5:50 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9lbrr04XBQ

Blu-ray uses blue laser (blue-ray!) DVD uses red and CD infrared. Devices compatibles with the 3 mediums have 3 lasers on their optical pickup.

Thanks. I anti-corrected it to red from blue when I found the video, and the statement felt really wrong when I wrote it, but I thought fuck-it - the video link is too good to miss! Lazy me.

How did you recover the data from CD/DVDs? I checked at a local shop they are not interested in recovering CDs.

I have a couple CD-Rs (from the early 2000s) that have completely lost their top layer. I suspect the cause is the label sticker that was used. But in any case, it's completely unreadable.

Interesting, I was surprised to be able to read medium or low quality brands from 99 well into 2010s. And I took no precious care.

Did you enable the "Try Really Hard" option? Can't remember the name of the software with it. Nero, maybe?

Many disk imaging programs have similar features. I'm partial to GNU ddrescue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue

I understand that it was common thing to offer, but who literally called the feature "Try Reall Hard"?

The more I've been thinking about it, was it one of the audio rippers?

The article focuses on Blu-Ray media, which has different physical characteristics than CD-R and DVD.

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