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One thing that really stuck out to me in the write speed graphs is the dropouts in the speed. The Maxell seemed to be the only one that didn't have them.

Back in the day my company had a regionally-slightly-popular Linux distro. Every couple months we'd burn 500-700 discs. We were small enough that it didn't make sense to mass produce, so we burned them ourselves.

We would occasionally get reports from people of being unable to read the discs, and so we went through ~6 months of investigation, test shipping to relatives, paying our customers to ship the discs back so we could check them.

Eventually I found that while every disc would validate by checksum of the entire disc (part of our burn process), if I tracked the time required to read every block, the discs that people had problems with would tend to have some spikes in the time it took to read some blocks. The drives we were using would read them, sometimes taking an amazingly long time to do so (like 30 minutes instead of 2), but users drives would just fail them.

Eventually I wrote a new validation process that in addition to the checksum used the timing information as well to determin if the disc failed, and at that point our failures in the field basically went to 0.

But, we got really sensitive to vendors of discs. Basically it was Taiyo Yuden or nothing. Some big brands would give us 20% failures to burn, where Taiyo Yuden was <1%.

It’s sad how Japanese brand names went from “sign of quality” to “basically non existent”

was this maybe an issue with the cd-writer? maybe at the speeds it was writing with?

I mean maybe, we had a few different models we burned with, but only a few. With the volume we needed to burn, we needed the speed. But, as a counter-point, I will say that with Taiyo Yuden discs our failures were very low, so the drives were only a component. IIRC we were using a lot of LiteOn drives which at the time were not bad.

> Taiyo Yuden or nothing

I remember this being my basic rule of thumb for buying writable DVDs, though for... home usage, nothing approaching your scale.

I also thought this was a longevity test.

I do love optical media and have a considerable CD, DVD, minidisc, and blu-ray collection. Like a Luddite, I still enjoy burning my own.

I especially like my Superscope disc copier. It completely disregards copy protection and I frequently make a backup of my favorite CDs which I store. Although much of my stock are older blanks (like those listed in this article)I’ll be sad if CD-R disappears from the market.

Could you recommend a usb CD drive for ripping audio CDs? A local library that I frequent has an extensive jazz collection and I'd like to rip it before they remove it, as I think it's just a matter of time before they do so.

If you just want to rip audio CDs, pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine. If you want a drive that can do everything up to and including UHD BD, try a Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD if you like slot loading or a Pioneer BDR-XD07B if you need a top-loader with snap-spindle for mini CDs or oddly-shaped CDs. These will cost way more than an old USB2-era drive but will be brand new.

You might be able to trawl your local thrift store and walk out with a $5 external drive from the 2000s, but a drive like that should be opened, dusted out, lens cleaned, and rails lubricated with some PTFE grease: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081JE0OO

Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software, and here's how to configure it: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/eac-ripping/

Or XLD if you're on Mac: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/xld-ripping/

> pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine.

This is not the case. Most of the cheap drives on Amazon sold by random capital letters people are complete shit. As an example, the "CB31005" drive doesn't fucking work. It often gets hung up on reading the TOC and won't even admit there is a CD in the drive. If it doesn't hang there, it reads fine for a while, then at some random point (possibly the first point of error) just gives up and fails to read sectors, forevermore, until you unplug and replug the drive.

Even with EAC (which is indeed very good), it just spends hours re-reading sectors up to its maximum number of retries, giving up, and inserting silence. Do not buy a CB31005.

Drat, I didn't realize the six-letter people had gotten to optical drives. The cheapest (materially and monetarily) I'd previously encountered was like a very very cost-reduced LG SATA drive which was $20 but still worked perfectly.

> Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software

What makes it the best? I assumed that, since you're just reading digital data, any ripping software would do the same job in terms of quality, and the only differences would mostly be about having some convenient features or a better UI.

CD audio data is indeed lossless data, and has some form of spreading the data physically (CIRC), but has limited error correction. Data CDs have more error correction data than audio CDs, so are more resilient to media degradation, scratches, etc.

When CD audio has errors, more often than not, the CD drive conceals the error -- it interpolates for this unreadable data and doesn't tell the host. Some drives do report C2 errors, but many lie about their capabilities, or have poor implementations.

Secondly, when you ask for CD audio, you can't say "give me the samples from 00:01:23.567 to 00:49:20.211". You can say "seek to 00:01:23.567; start playing; give me the audio samples over ATA as you read them". You can also say "tell me where you think you are on the disc right now". CD drives do not do this reliably, or give reliable answers. Exact Audio Copy is looking to detect this and account for it.

EAC is best used with drives which reliably report wrong locations, i.e. are always wrong by a fixed amount, and EAC can learn by how much by comparing how your drive reports known discs to what's in the AccurateRip database.... but EAC can also work with drives that are unreliably wrong as well, it just has to read the same audio data multiple times over to get a good fix on where that audio really is on the CD.

See https://www.accuraterip.com/ for more details of how CD drives lie to you and let you down

XLD is one of my favorite pieces of software, +1.

Any drive will be capable of ripping just fine. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty finding a drive with well known read offsets and the ability to defeat the drive cache is a good bet so you can compare against the accuraterip database.

https://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm

Not all CD-ROM drives, even those that can play audio, can be used to rip digital audio. Some only have an analogue audio output for playing CDs. I know at least some IDE CD-ROM drives can't read digital audio.

It might be true that all SATA drives can read digital audio.

Note of caution about others comments that suggests using cheap CD drive, audio CDs tracks have no redundancy checks, and production of ripping artifacts is directly related to the drive raw accuracy.

That said CD seek is so slow that drives cannot really afford to rely much on redundancy checks, so maybe this is not of concern.

Safest would probably be any drive from the "top drives" AccurateRip list here: https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/forum/dbpoweramp/cd-ripper/3247...

If you have an old mac, you can take out the SuperDrive and use that!

Worked flawlessly in contrast to a no-name USB DVD drive I bought on AliExpress

Fun fact: in the G4/G5 era, the SuperDrive was a Pioneer DVR-1xx rebadged. That's how I got into them in the first place :)

This is also why the Pioneer-branded models work just perfectly in Mac OS 9 and every version of Mac OS X with no PatchBurn necessary: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/patchburn

My experience with Aliexpress USB CD drives is they contain recycled laptop optical drives, sometimes over a decade old!

I do have this[1] one (product code: 43888 not 43889). Ripped a bunch of CDs perfectly.

AFAIK, 43888 is preferred by makemkv forums as it's internal drive can be flashed to support ripping blu-rays as well.

[1] https://www.verbatim.com/prod/accessories/disc-drives--burne...

As others said, the only thing you should be looking for is a drive that works with Accuraterip. Ripping discs from my local library is a hobby of mine and I've discovered so much music from there. I still buy CDs from thrift shops and the occasional garage sale, but having my music collection neatly organized and ripped/verified in FLAC is something I enjoy a lot.

To piggyback, is there a good USB Blu ray drive?

(And is there a known good CLI tool for backing up copies of them?)

I have some Blu Rays I worry will be lost to disc rot 20 years from now...

I've used the Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD[0] and that's worked well with MakeMKV[1]! I've only tried it on normal DVDs, but Blu-Rays should work well too.

[0]: https://usa.pioneer/collections/optical-drives/products/bdr-...

[1]: https://makemkv.com/

In this case you need a drive with firmware older than February 2023's v1.03 which disabled MakeMKV's LibreDrive. Mine is v1.01. See here: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30383

Mine was purchased after that date, does that only apply to Blu-Ray?

Yes, and even then only for Ultra HD Blu-ray. Regular BDs should still usually work unless they're uncommon enough to not have a title key known to MakeMKV.

“A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself ‘revoked’. LibreDrive compatible drive is required to read UHD discs.”

Thanks, good to know!

Check your drive anyway. Purchased after that date does not necessarily mean manufactured after that date :)

It sucks that firmware updates used to be a thing to look forward to but now are something to be avoided at all cost. I'd rather buy a second drive if I needed some new feature.

MakeMKV will show you all the relevant drive info when you start it up, including LibreDrive status. Here's my BDR-XS07 for example: https://i.imgur.com/10CGsbm.png

With a combination of MakeMKV, DVDfab Passkey, and a LibreDrive-supporting drive I can rip pretty much anything. Passkey is a driver-level thing like AnyDVD HD. Both of them are available perpetually-licensed but AnyDVD is currently being legaled and is unavailable: https://www.dvdfab.cn/passkey.htm

You can try MakeMKV for free using the beta key posted monthly on their subreddit, but I just went ahead and bought it because it's not that expensive and then I don't have to think about it: https://old.reddit.com/r/makemkv/comments/1jolbsq/the_may_ke...

I'm currently going through and backing up my library with Passkey's “Rip to Image”. Due to the way LibreDrive works, it's common for MakeMKV to be able to make MKVs (lol) directly from a BD/UHD disc in the drive but fail to open a protected ISO of the same title. For this reason I uncheck “Keep Protection” in Passkey for anything AACS (BD, UHD, HD-DVD (yes I have an HD-DVD drive)) so I can run the image through MakeMKV later. I do check “Keep Protection” for DVDs however, because CSS is fully broken and I want to do the most untouched rip possible.

any CD-R drive can do that, and they are dirt cheap (you should only say CD for audio which refers to audio output rather than the audio CDs themselves) CD-R drives can read audio CDs.

so can DVD-R drives with computer interfaces.

Do you have any advice for burning CD-Rs that will play on old players? My Sony CD changer, and the CD players in both cars won’t play CD-Rs I make. They play CDs fine. I assume it is because the lasers have gotten weaker with time and can’t read the CD-Rs which don’t have as much difference between a 1 and 0 pit compared to stamped CDs? I even ordered Verbatim ones with blue azo dye that was supposed to help but still no dice.

Are you burning it as slow as possible? That can help a bit, but I’m almost sure you know about it.

I have this problem as well with my 2005 Prius CD player, and my 2005 Odyssey's changer before I replaced that car. I think only the highest quality CD-Rs written at the lowest possible speed is your best bet, but I think there are more variables than that.

Have you tried a different writer?

I've only tried my HHB BurnIT CDR-830, which I love.

https://rapmag.com/a/01/feb01/hhb-burnit-cdr-830-review

I guess it's time to find an old computer CD burner and see if those work.

Great choice with the Pioneer DVR-111. They're my favorite series of drives ever. NEC ND-3500 chipset; Pioneer mechanism.

Pioneer publish the approved media list for their drives but it's not really detailed enough since it only lists by manufacturer while the firmware is operating on manufacturer plus media code: https://www.mfdigital.com/downloads/Pioneer%20111%20approved...

You can potentially get better results by patching your discs into your drive's firmware using MediaCodeSpeedEdit: https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/

Yes, of course there is software to patch firmware of "ancient" optical drives in order to support media that wasn't supported at the time of manufacture. Of course. Sometimes, I actually love 2025 a little bit. Thanks.

2004–2011 actually :)

https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/changelog.txt

> 1.1.0.8 14 Oct 2007 — added read speed patch for PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-111/112/212 drives, increasing +/-R read speed from 12x to 16x, +/-DL/RW from 8x to 12x. This patch is not available for 109/110 drives because 16x/12x is a bit too fast for smooth reading on these drives.

> 1.1.0.1 01 May 2007 — added RPC1 patch for DVR-111 and DVR-112 firmwares, added flasher patch allowing downgrade and 'same to same' flashing for DVR-111 and DVR-112 firmware flasher

> 1.0.8.18 10 Sep 2006 — added support for PIONEER DVR-111D 1.29, DVR-111 1.29

> 1.0.8.17 18 Jul 2006 — added support for Pioneer (Buffalo) DVR-111D 8.25, DVR-111L 8.26

I had PILES of CD-R and CD-RW from the turn of the century that are coasters now. Stored in the dry and dark...just absolutely unreadable.

Oddly, the photo CDs I got professionally written were great.

With regards to the first one described the TDK with the UV guard, I am curious as to what that is. My guess is it has more to do with avoiding UV related damage than blocking UV.

I am not sure the authors spectrometer test(which was very cool, avidly reading that series of articles right now) would reveal anything as polycarbonate is naturally quite opaque to uv light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate#/media/File:Visi... Note how the transmission is dramatically reduced once past violet.

Fun fact ordinary clear polycarbonate eyeglasses do just as good a job as sun glasses at protecting your eyes from uv.

This is not, as one might guess from the title, a test of data longevity on disks

Agree, I was also mislead by the submission title, which has been changed from the original article title: "Optical Discs From Japan – Part 6: TDK UV Guard, Fuji, LG/Sony, Maxell, CMC"

> Agree, I was also mislead by the submission title, which has been changed from the original article title: "Optical Discs From Japan – Part 6: TDK UV Guard, Fuji, LG/Sony, Maxell, CMC"

I changed the original title, to express it's testing "new old stock" of DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later, as in "writing to these DVD-R and CD-R that were made a long time ago, and kept in their box".

Quoting from the article: "The Fuji did well even after all these years – it’s likely that disc is at least 25 years old. "

I think this is more informative than the original title, because there is not much interest in testing how to burn optical media (we have figured that out by how), while checking in great detail if OLD optical media can STILL be burned is very interesting!

I was captivated by the spectrometer test to check the UV protection, as I would expect that to be the #1 problem for data longevity testing.

I have CD-Rs from decades ago that are fine... but I always used the whatever the Library of Congress used for archival purposes (they were the pricey dual layer gold ones from Verbatim)

Same here, but I have since re-backed them up to "cold" spare internal hard drives I have lying around that remain unplugged, in addition to my NAS storage. I just cannot trust them.

A durability test would be an interesting future article. I need to dig up my old backups and check how readable they are now.

CD-Rs are great, especially taiyo yuden

Out of business for awhile now.. I'd guess 90% or more CD-Rs made now are CMC. Ritek might still make some. There is also falconrak in UAE making them. At this point I am curious if anyone in Japan is still doing it... Does Memory-Tech in japan make recordable media??

Taiyo Yuden sold their process and tooling to CMC, and they're now sold as "CMC Pro" discs. I previously used JVC branded Japanese Taiyo Yuden discs. I switched to CMC Pro when I ran out, and haven't noticed any difference in quality.

To be clear, Taiyo Yuden sold their patents and manuf equipment to CMC Magnetics in Taiwan.

I never heard of Falcon Tech Int'l before today. I found info about their CD-Rs/DVD-Rs here: https://falconrak.com/product/products-matrix-2/

I will take this opportunity and ask. Are there any special CD / DVD player where it could better read very old disk?

IMO the only way to perfectly protect yourself against Ransomware Attacks is with CD-Rs, because it's something not even hardware can alter. A skilled take over of the root level of a machine can be encrypting everything and you'd never know it, until the day it denies your access, by deleting an encryption key until you pay up to get it back...you hope.

Things like RDX backup cartridges have a physical write protect lever on them

A few years ago (before affordable cloud backup offerings) this was fairly common for Small Businesses to use, for this reason.

Only works if the software cannot circumvent it (implemented fully in hardware).

Modern backup systems use reference counting mechanisms, which means you can set up any old versions policy you want. Something like "last 3 annual backups + last 12 monthly ones + last 8 weekly ones + last 30 daily ones" will help a lot against slow encryptors.

You'll want to ensure the malware can't destroy your backup, but that is possible too. A traditional way is to have a separate backup machine that runs backup program and pulls files remotely. Some backup apps can store directly to cloud storage and can work with "append only" permissions, to ensure that client can't delete existing backups. In this configuration, a separate trusted machine must run pruning periodically.

That's all true, and probably a better system overall, but burning an optical disk, labelling it, and putting it on a shelf does feel like a more accessible backup regime for many people. :-)

Fair enough! The danger with disks however is that it's an entirely manual operation which is easy to forget. Something setup-once-and-forget - local server or a cloud-based one like backblaze - is more likely to actually have the latest data when you need it.

(Another reason is that the disks do bit rot however, and you'll never know until it's too late. Meanwhile, my ZFS fileserver sends me a email every weekend that it's scrubbed all the disks and found no errors - this warms my heart :) )

And what they say in the industries that need to take this ultra seriously (Banking and Insurance companies, for example) an untested backup is not considered a good backup. And the only way to truly test a backup is install a fresh image of the entire OS (using checksums on the image too), so that you can read the data and make sure no clever ransome-ware software is secretly encrypting EVEN your backups.

oh, btw. "Blockchains solve this" haha.

Well, yeah.. you never want to test backups on the same computer you made them, so to test them, you should go to secondary/friends/work computer and try to access the files. Boot from a fresh LiveUSB stick if you are feeling paranoid. At least once you have backup configured, there is often a fuse driver, so an easy way to do so is to browse backups and try to open a few documents at random.

As for "encrypting your backups", that's what the "check" command is for - it can't ensure that this .py file actually contains python code (and not encrypted data with ransomware message), but it can check that indices are well-formed, and file checksums match the uploaded contents. Obviously it should also be run on trusted machine.

Not sure what this whole "blockchain" comment was about.

That's a great idea about using just a LiveUSB thumb drive. Much better than my idea of actually "installing" a fresh OS.

The blockchain I mentioned was just a reference to the fact that with hashcodes on everything make corruptions at least detectable, but yeah it wasn't clear what I meant.

Can a CD-R drive force a second pass burning over existing data to make the disc unusable? Perhaps with drive firmware modification.

Afaik you can "erase" contents of a disk with open session. Data is still there just invisible without specialized tools, enough to fool non nerds.

It would be safer to use a read-only drive when reading back the backups.

Disk drives used to have a write-enable jumper on them. No more.

IIRC, those were more of a suggestion from the drive to prevent writing. It didn’t actually physically prevent it from being overwritten.

Drives? I havent seen one yet. Floppies yes, but just like SD cards its just a plastic piece being read by controller GPIO and a mere suggestion to the hardware.

There are forensic Write blockers for drives tho starting at around $200 for SATA/IDE solution.

Some of really old SCSI and (I think)IDE HDDs did have "WP" jumper positions. I don't know practically how it was implemented, though.

What about DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs?

Or BD-Rs. 50GB on a single dual layer disc. Haven't finished the last spindle I bought, but I assume they're the cheapest per GB by now.

Checking diskprices.com - https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new,used&disk_ty... - there's a cheaper outlier for DVD-R, then it's 25GB BD-Rs for a bit.

LTO tape can be cheaper, but the cost of the drives has long been an obstacle to dabbling.

Yeah, the prices don't seem to be correct. New 16TB HDD for $200. DVD+R 25x pack for $2, etc. Clicking the links shows different prices on amazon, etc.

You don't need to worry about ransomware destroying the data on your writable DVDs, the discs themselves can do that fine.

Yeah disc rot is a real problem. CD/DVD-R are great when it comes to physically store drives (they don't take much space on a shelf and are easely sent via mail) but I'd rather use a hard drive and the cloud for my backups now.

The problem goes away if you burn slow, no faster than half the disc's max speed, to adequately affect the dye. I have CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that are 20 years old and work great. Inherent rot is mainly a problem with pressed discs which use aluminum instead of silver or gold for the reflective layer.

I burn my CD-Rs at a very low speed, like someone else mentioned below, so the laser does a better burn. I don't use CD-Rs as primary backup. I have 10 external hard drives, 20 thumb drives, and do a CD-R only once every couple of weeks. I just feel better having multiple different hardware devices used.

i use dropbox

This would have been a great comment if you were that original 'why not use FTP?' guy :)

I use FTP.

Speaking of that...I need to look into online storage solutions myself. I mean even a zip file on Google Drive! Not doing that currently. I always rotate thru literally 20 different devices for my backups, but if a meteor hits my house it's all gone.

So many non-technical people think "a backup" is enough. I learned long ago to keep 20.

I personally use a hard drive in my house, and a cold storage solution (Glacier) from a reputable provider.

where is he buying these discs?

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