Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevstev | Hacker News Reader

| Neither my dad nor I knew how writable media like that worked at the time, and I think we both assumed that, assuming they didn't get scratched, they would last forever. Obviously we were wrong.

I am surprised at this, as the CD age highlighted the importance of quality media. At one point you would actually mentally allocate 2-3 cds for any thing you would want to burn to account for frequent issues. Kodak Golds became the bar for quality, I think I still have a bunch of unused ones on a spindle in a box somewhere.

Interestingly enough, I still have a whole lot of burned and unburned CDs, but don't actually have a reader for them these days. It wasn't even something I was aware of, my desktops gave way to laptops, and new ones didn't include an optical media drive, and now I just don't have a cd/dvd reader.

View on HN

I bought a cheap USB DVD burner for this reason. I don't expect to read a lot of optical discs, but they are something that is easy to deploy when using old computers that can't USB boot, and it was only about $25.

This is one of the cases that a magneto-optical system like MiniDisc excels at. It's not fast (though, if it had been financially viable for Sony, who knows what it would look like now), but it's far more persistent than CD/DVD-R's, because there's no dye to break down - it's just physics. My audio MiniDiscs are as good today as they were when I recorded them 20 years ago.

I mean, honestly, I don't think either my dad nor I did any research on the quality of the DVDs we were buying. I think, for whatever reason, we just assumed that there wasn't a fundamental difference between the cheap and expensive stuff. Obviously we should have researched it more if we were using it for preservation.

I keep a USB blu-ray drive around because I like to have rips of my physical media, and it seems to read CDs just fine. None of my computers have a CD drive built in anymore.

At the time I (and my dad) were buying CD-R and DVD-R for storing/backing up home media, we still had dial-up internet. "Research" was precious time on the phone line and while I am one to indulge in an excursion down the presumably gratuitous information rabbit hole on many topics, the archival-ness of burned discs never occurred to me. It must have been a discussion on it here on HN, many years after the last time I used disc drive for burning, that I realized it was something worth thinking about.

That's a valid reason; sadly I don't have it. My family was the first that I knew of (personally) to get cable internet, we had it in some capacity since 1999, so our internet was fast and unlimited. We should have done a Google search.

Still, I don't feel like we came to the conclusion of CDs being archive-grade on our own, someone probably told us that a "CD will last forever" and we just never questioned it.

Coming from floppy disks which were always a fridge (or file cabinet) magnet away from total destruction it made sense. I didn't know that anything after vinyl LPs were pressed so burned with a laser just sounded much more permanent than bit-flipped-by-magnet. Meaning, faster internet wouldn't have made me any more likely to question this stuff but made it easier if by chance I came across some advice to do so. Anyway it's 2024 and my dad still has floppies (working) and cable internet, but the world still turns 'round I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com