Burned disks are trash for longevity. I've had many CD-Rs that developed literal physical holes in the data layer or where the data layer simply flaked off after a few years.
All nand flash based devices will die. Doesn't matter how gently you care for them, the electrons will slowly diffuse out of their little buckets and they will cease to function. As for when, according to the internet it's somewhere between 1 week and 40 years. I'm predicting the mask rom systems will outlast all of the nand flash systems - including disc based systems that use flash for their bios. Although when it starts happening, there will be a big market for bios replacements to rebuild the systems - but DS, 3DS and Switch games are going to turn into pumpkins.
I like them for what they are good at, but hard drives are terrible for archive storage purposes. If you look at old school PCs, old hard drives almost never work. New ones are improved, sure, but there's still enough of the same design that will struggle to survive 30 years of storage. I wouldn't save anything on a hard drive as the only way to have it 10 years from now.
Disc rot is a problem on pressed games too. A CD is a piece of polycarbonate with aluminum on one side, then lacquer on top of that. If the lacquer fails then the aluminum can oxidize and flake off.
I hear people on the internet say this a lot, but I have yet to encounter a disc with this, and I have CDs that go back to the 80s. Even talking to other people, the only time I have heard of it happening was with Sega CD stuff. I think most pressed discs will be good for a long time, there are just handfuls of bad batches that die prematurely. I don't think it's as common as internet people act like.
As far as CD Rs though, they are very unreliable. Was going through some CDRs and DVDRs that had old home movies and photos, and a good amount of them didn't work anymore.
CDMediaWorld was basically my guide to which labels and chemistries were the ones to get. It was crazy how much research was there, down to which brands came from the same production lines with a different name on it. Despite the copyright at the bottom, I don't think it's been updated in 20 years.
Most of the discs I burned back in the late 90s and early 2000s are still kicking. I recently transferred my old SD fansubs and stuff to M-Disc BluRay. As an aside, these are expensive, but it's nice to condense my hoard old cakeboxes into a 20 disc case.
That said, maybe 5 years ago I picked up more CD-R when my stash of blanks was used, for use with a PC Engine CD. I recently revisted and, of everything I tried, all the stuff I burned on old stock is still good and the majority of the stuff I burned on new stock had a lot of errors. Same burning hardware, all tested when it was fresh.
The same problem with floppy disks back in the day. At the tail end of production, the media was absolute trash with shit quality control. I would recommend to anyone who needs media for legacy formats today to do a little Retail Archeology and check out the back and bottom shelves of office supply stores to find new old stock instead of whatever they're shipping out of warehouses today.
I have a huge book of old CD-Rs with games on it I've been going through the last year and getting into a more usable format. I don't think any of them have failed except the ones with obviously physical damage. They aren't as bad as they seem given normal inside storage conditions.
This stuff being things that have been totally out of mind for a decade plus. That's one of the reasons I like discs, I put this stuff away to the level of almost discarding it and it's still fine. Many other formats I would have had to actively keep, and I don't think I have anything left that was on my computer in the 90s that wasn't on CD.
Modern BD-R is nice too, they are so niche more effort is put into longevity than when CD-Rs were everywhere.
I considered migrating my old CDs to more modern storage but it's all stuff I haven't touched in a decade and probably never will again. So it doesn't really matter if it still works or not. The CDs can continue to exist in their Schrödinger state .
Burned disks are trash for longevity. I've had many CD-Rs that developed literal physical holes in the data layer or where the data layer simply flaked off after a few years.
All nand flash based devices will die. Doesn't matter how gently you care for them, the electrons will slowly diffuse out of their little buckets and they will cease to function. As for when, according to the internet it's somewhere between 1 week and 40 years. I'm predicting the mask rom systems will outlast all of the nand flash systems - including disc based systems that use flash for their bios. Although when it starts happening, there will be a big market for bios replacements to rebuild the systems - but DS, 3DS and Switch games are going to turn into pumpkins.
I like them for what they are good at, but hard drives are terrible for archive storage purposes. If you look at old school PCs, old hard drives almost never work. New ones are improved, sure, but there's still enough of the same design that will struggle to survive 30 years of storage. I wouldn't save anything on a hard drive as the only way to have it 10 years from now.
That's what RAID5 is for. My NAS has been going strong for well over 10 years.
Got any product recommendations for a consumer grade NAS for someone who isn't really looking to stand up a full fledged server rack?
Disc rot is a problem on pressed games too. A CD is a piece of polycarbonate with aluminum on one side, then lacquer on top of that. If the lacquer fails then the aluminum can oxidize and flake off.
I hear people on the internet say this a lot, but I have yet to encounter a disc with this, and I have CDs that go back to the 80s. Even talking to other people, the only time I have heard of it happening was with Sega CD stuff. I think most pressed discs will be good for a long time, there are just handfuls of bad batches that die prematurely. I don't think it's as common as internet people act like.
As far as CD Rs though, they are very unreliable. Was going through some CDRs and DVDRs that had old home movies and photos, and a good amount of them didn't work anymore.
CDMediaWorld was basically my guide to which labels and chemistries were the ones to get. It was crazy how much research was there, down to which brands came from the same production lines with a different name on it. Despite the copyright at the bottom, I don't think it's been updated in 20 years.
Most of the discs I burned back in the late 90s and early 2000s are still kicking. I recently transferred my old SD fansubs and stuff to M-Disc BluRay. As an aside, these are expensive, but it's nice to condense my hoard old cakeboxes into a 20 disc case.
That said, maybe 5 years ago I picked up more CD-R when my stash of blanks was used, for use with a PC Engine CD. I recently revisted and, of everything I tried, all the stuff I burned on old stock is still good and the majority of the stuff I burned on new stock had a lot of errors. Same burning hardware, all tested when it was fresh.
The same problem with floppy disks back in the day. At the tail end of production, the media was absolute trash with shit quality control. I would recommend to anyone who needs media for legacy formats today to do a little Retail Archeology and check out the back and bottom shelves of office supply stores to find new old stock instead of whatever they're shipping out of warehouses today.
I have a huge book of old CD-Rs with games on it I've been going through the last year and getting into a more usable format. I don't think any of them have failed except the ones with obviously physical damage. They aren't as bad as they seem given normal inside storage conditions.
This stuff being things that have been totally out of mind for a decade plus. That's one of the reasons I like discs, I put this stuff away to the level of almost discarding it and it's still fine. Many other formats I would have had to actively keep, and I don't think I have anything left that was on my computer in the 90s that wasn't on CD.
Modern BD-R is nice too, they are so niche more effort is put into longevity than when CD-Rs were everywhere.
I considered migrating my old CDs to more modern storage but it's all stuff I haven't touched in a decade and probably never will again. So it doesn't really matter if it still works or not. The CDs can continue to exist in their Schrödinger state .