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Comment by piskov | Hacker News Reader

However if you’ve tried to read those cd-rw after 20-30 years, they would most likely be corrupted.

Factory stampted cds are better in this regard

So I actually had a use case for this last month. My NAS is too weak to run immich well, so I dusted off my old sandybridge core i7 laptop from ~2011, and it actually benchmarks about 4x my nas, and has 8GB of RAM. But it was still loaded with windows. Long story short, its actually kind of difficult these days to install linux on such an old box, distros have become massive. I searched around in my closet and found my old spindle of burned CDs- and I wanted to go on a nostalgia trip, and every one I tried worked! I used Kodak Golds, which have lived up to their hype.

I even burned a CD of the smallest ubuntu distro I could find, and its happily running linux and hosting Immich, among other things.

Factory stamps are still not immune to bit rot, even when stored in ideal conditions.

Maybe not, but I think the concerns are a bit overblown. Just like the other poster, I've had CDs and DVDs that lived for over 10 years in an attic and a fair number of them are 25+ years old. No problems reading them!

Nearly a decade ago I digitized my families cds and dvds. The stamped discs had about a 10% failure rate, which was higher than I expected.

Fortunately the vast majority of discs people own aren’t particularly rare, so if they loose a disc from a top 40 artist, they can easily get a replacement.

> Factory stamped cds are better in this regard

One thing factory CDs don't do well is spin. I think they were probably balanced good enough for 1x, but trying to rip some of them at 48x is noisy and feels close to explosive deconstruction.

Is there a reason why or is it just the quality of the materials?

CD-Rs use an organic dye which fades (or in the worst case the bonds holding it on can delaminate).

They hold up much better if stored in a dark place. A spindle on a shelf that sees sunlight is the worst case and they can become unreadable in years.

But the above comment said CD-RW? Those are a crystal.

I assumed it was a typo since the topic was burning mixtape discs for folks and I've never heard of anyone giving out CD-RWs like that

Also don't CD-Rs need a more sensitive detector in the drive to read? I remember seeing somewhere that early drives have trouble with them

I remember reading about drives/players that wouldn't read CD-R, but I've never encountered one in the wild.

Anecdotally, every time I've tried: A burned CD that works well with one reader works with all others.

It was a hobby of mine at that time. I tried a lot of combinations: I was working at a local hifi shop where we had all kinds of stuff rolling through to play around with.

Stamped = Data pits are a physical, unalterable thing on the disc. CD-R = Pits are still physical, but they are on a die layer that can fade. Some discs are more resilient (blue, gold) than others (cyan). CD-RW = Pits are (mostly) bistable for practical purposes, but will degrade to a neutral state on a long-term basis.

"Unalterable" is a matter of some debate... The physical pits and lands are on a super thin layer of aluminum. Ideally, this is protected with a laquer coating, but a lot of CD manufacturers in the 90s and 00s skimped on this to save money. I owned a lot of CDs where the coating didn't hold up over time and the aluminum just sort of flaked off, or became damaged/scratched easier than they should have with normal handling.

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