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The Reliability of Optical Disks

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Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> local electromagnetic event then I'd prefer to have a backup that can handle that. First of all, the magnetic gauss needed to flip bits on LTO media is huge. It's not a practical concern unless you're choosing an incredibly inappropriate storage location. Second, why wouldn't you store your tapes in a case or a vault that is magnetically shielded? You probably store your discs in cases, instead of insisting they be…

> First of all, the magnetic gauss needed to flip bits on LTO media is huge. It's not a practical concern unless you're choosing an incredibly inappropriate storage location. You're right, it does seem huge: https://superuser.com/a/568367/111650 (Some of the links from this answer are quite interesting.) The issue is that I don't know (and I suspect it's difficult to know or even classified) whether an EMP attack (th…

The EMP from a nuclear weapon is mostly radio frequency and would be picked up by antennas, power lines and such. (I know an ex-military ham who always unplugs his HF/shortwave radio from the antenna and power when he's not using it because that's what they taught him to do back in the day.)

I don't see that kind of EMP erasing magnetic media.

Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#102
I personally was going through a large binder of old backups this week that's been in my parents basement away from sun for 15 years.

Many CDs and later DVDs. The DVDs were all seemingly fine but a sizable portion, maybe 20%, of the CDs are flaking along the outside. I was honestly kind of surprised.

Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#103
9ct/GB for plain BD-R is a rip-off. They cost 0.08 USD a piece (if you reach MOQ on Alibaba), plus about the same as patent license fees. So 16ct/25GB, not 9ct/GB.

Taking storage overhead (cases of some sort; spindles aren't well-suited to store BD long-tem) into account, the Chinese 20ct/50GB (plus patent; iirc sub-linear scaling with capacity?) option of a DL BD-R may easily be cheaper over all.

Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#104
post #103

9ct/GB for plain BD-R is a rip-off. They cost 0.08 USD a piece (if you reach MOQ on Alibaba), plus about the same as patent license fees. So 16ct/25GB, not 9ct/GB. Taking storage overhead (cases of some sort; spindles aren't well-suited to store BD long-tem) into account, the Chinese 20ct/50GB (plus patent; iirc sub-linear scaling with capacity?) option of a DL BD-R may easily be cheaper over all.

My costing put it as positive compared to disk even without massive discounts, but physical volume is a problem, and cheaply constructed disks are volatile.

There's an open space for cheap tape drives.

Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#105
post #74

Great article discussing the benefits of optical discs and the author's own experience of using them! I burned hundreds of discs a decade ago and read them all back perfectly, to my surprise. I strongly agree with the write-once behavior for photos and downloads. HDDs worry me in the long term because even if the platter holding the data is fine, the R/W head, mechanics, and electronics could fail, not to mention tha…

Archival Disc exists, they just don't support bare discs or readers. You have to buy a full Sony ODA Gen 2 system and...

reads the linked comment

notices my own reply

...oh. Nevermind.

So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that all of the new formats are not "forthcoming" because of basically two problems that happened at roughly the same time:

- Newer optical media formats became too expensive to implement in consumer devices

- Optical media is inherently user-hostile, almost as much as tape

Ok, first claim first. Back when Blu-Ray first came out, drives were hideously expensive; to the point where the PS3 was basically eating SONY alive because the drive itself cost as much to make as the whole console sold for. Apple outright said they'd never ship a Blu-Ray drive in a Mac because it was too expensive and the patent licensing was a nightmare. Even today Blu-Ray drives are still more than twice as expensive as DVD drives.

But, of course, this isn't the only hurdle, but it did dramatically slow Blu-Ray adoption. The spat between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray almost certainly didn't help either. All of that ultimately meant that people weren't buying Blu-Ray players and putting them in their living rooms; which meant that it didn't make sense to have one in your PC either.

The dirty secret of optical media is that it's remarkably user-hostile as a consumer storage medium. Discs want to be written from beginning to end, and preferably all-at-once with a single table of contents. This makes it very difficult to actually provide a drag-and-drop utility for getting files onto a disc. You can do this, but in most cases this is a hack involving multi-session filesystems that relies on readers knowing how to stitch together the sessions. This is why Windows had that entirely unhelpful "What do you want to do with this disc" dialog for optical media. If you try to use a Blu-Ray disc like a flash drive you will be extremely disappointed in it.

In the days of CDs and DVDs this didn't matter. The consumer benefit was that the discs you were making could go straight into a CD player or DVD player that you already had; the fact that you had to jump through some hoops to do it didn't matter. And if you bought CDs or DVDs you can play them on your computer, too. But far fewer people owned Blu-Ray players, and if they did the player probably also took USB drives. So there would be no reason to ever burn a disc to get a movie onto a player, and getting data onto them was enough of a pain in people's arses that they'd just use USB drives instead.

So with all that taken together, nobody is bothering to scale optical discs for consumers because there really isn't a market for them as a data storage medium anymore. The things that discs still do well - i.e. selling you prerecorded movies - also just so happens to still be fine with topping out at 100GB/disc, even for 4K video. Some games are starting to push beyond what a BD-XL can hold, but those games also are "live service" games that update way too frequently for "getting all the assets on the disc" to make any sense. All the supra-Blu-Ray optical data storage formats are all targeted towards the archival market because it's something that optical just accidentally does very well.

Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#106
I wish I did more rigorous work on this but I managed a large Rewritable DVD backup for a satellite instrument with over 3000 DVDs stored in a filing cabinet for almost ten years. When I joined about three years in I added checksums to the backups and infrequently sampled and reburned older discs and found zero corruption after almost a decade stored in those conditions. Given there was a mix of R and RW burned discs I was actually pretty surprised there was no corruption because I had it ingrained in my mind these things shouldn’t last so long.

Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#107
post #74

Great article discussing the benefits of optical discs and the author's own experience of using them! I burned hundreds of discs a decade ago and read them all back perfectly, to my surprise. I strongly agree with the write-once behavior for photos and downloads. HDDs worry me in the long term because even if the platter holding the data is fine, the R/W head, mechanics, and electronics could fail, not to mention tha…

>HDDs worry me in the long term

Are SSDs any better in that regard?

Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No longer manufactured, I believe; only available on eBay?

It is still made.

No. DVD M-disc are no longer manufactured, only blu-ray M-Disc is available. Which is a pity, because the DVD version was rated for longer longetivity.

Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matches my experience. Even decades-old CD-ROMs only fail when they are scratched or physically damaged, which you can prevent by keeping them in appropriate cases and always put them back after use.

My own experience is different. I had several brands of CD media that lasted less than 10 years. Many of them you could see the damage (cracks through the shiny layer). Some were dark blue, some a light blue. Almost all of them were bad. I had them stored in a light proof zipper pouch and stored at room temperature in a closet. Maybe something special happened to them over the years but very few worked. This would ha…

CD-ROM != CD-R/RW

Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks

#110
post #74

Great article discussing the benefits of optical discs and the author's own experience of using them! I burned hundreds of discs a decade ago and read them all back perfectly, to my surprise. I strongly agree with the write-once behavior for photos and downloads. HDDs worry me in the long term because even if the platter holding the data is fine, the R/W head, mechanics, and electronics could fail, not to mention tha…

>HDDs worry me in the long term Are SSDs any better in that regard?

No, the memory cells lose charge over time. Even one year can cause data loss. Sorry, I don't have the link, but there was someone who tested how latency increased on drives that spent months on the shelf. The explanation was error correction working harder.
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