8 Mar
2006
8 Mar
'06
2:17 p.m.
Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com> wrote:
quotes below? These are from a (more or less) private
email list.
"The best technology was developed by Mitsui and is now manufactured by
MAM-A, referred to as "Archival Gold". It uses a gold / gold
phthalocyanine process which does not oxidize and is more resistant to
the plastic failure. They have done accelerated testing and advertise
the product as being good for 300 years. NIST and some university labs
have been doing comparative testing and there is some belief that the
life will be well beyond that. You can get a spindle of 50 for about
$100.
A step down from this, Taiyo Yuden makes their "silver" quality. Taiyo
Yuden developed the original recordable CD/DVD technology and has
remained an industry leader. Their product is advertised as 100-year.
Taiyo Yuden disks can be had for under 50 cents a disk, getting to be
more like 35 cents. There's really no reason to buy the cheapie stuff
any more."
Clearly if this is true I'm switching to the silver ones and buying some
gold ones too. But I am skeptical...
(300 years does meet/exceed my archival goals :-)
I think from the prices and names used in the quoted text, that these
comments are less than 3 years old. This is when Mitsui became MAM-A.
Five and ten years ago, Kodak and a few Japanese companies also did
gold disks. They left that business behind, I'm guessing the $ to
be made were pretty small for what had become a "specialty" CD-R.
No matter whether you get gold or silver or whatever, the biggest
risk of all is scratching the top of the CD-R. The Kodak Gold
had an extra coating on top which helped there. Even then the
smart thing to do is put them in a good box.
I'm going to speculate that in 20 years, CD-R readers are going
to be somewhat specialty items, not too different than finding a
vinyl record player today. Yeah, there's probably some store
in town that has one or two. 100 years, that's a lot harder to
guess. Media longevity is kinda irrelevant if your descendants
throw it away because they don't know what it is or how to read
it. (I'm 100% sure that most kids today don't know how to play
a vinyl record... much less dial a rotary dial telephone!) It
doesn't matter much that readers are available as long as everyone
believes they aren't easy to find.
In 100 years it'll be like a cylinder record. Yeah, my dad still
has cylinder records and a player, as do museums.
Tim.