Do un-burned CD-R/DVD+-R/BD-R go bad after some time?

[VirtualLarry]

Just curious what the consensus is. I'm not sure how many other people out there hoard various brands and types of optical discs. I've got some CompUSA-branded 4X DVD+Rs in front of me. I looked it up, and my local CompUSA store closed in 2007, so these are at least that old. They are good RICOHJPN discs, so I would like to eventually use them, but I haven't gotten to that yet.

Does temp (freezing in a storage unit) affect unburned discs too? Or are most e-commerce warehouses un-heated in the winter too?

Edit: I think that my old Benq DW1640 IDE DVD+-R/W drive(s) could "overspeed" burn these discs at 8X. (Those were good drives, I think I still have two of them somewhere. Too bad that they are IDE, and they never made a SATA equivalent.)

http://club.myce.com/f33/does-blank-dvd-deteriorate-136121/index3.html?PageSpeed=noscript

 

[pcgeek11]

I have some that I bought in 2004ish that I am still using. Not a bad one yet.

 

[iluvdeal]

Yeah I got a bunch of spindles of DVD+Rs in my closet they are almost a decade old from stockpiling them from deals. Hard drives getting larger and cheaper have negated my need to burn DVDs so I doubt I'll ever use them all.

 

[Soulkeeper]

long as they aren't sitting in the sun i'd think unburnt cd/dvd-r disks would last many years (uv, heat, etc.)
burnt ones do eventually get issues i'd have to double check but I think it's like ~50yrs

It's worth noting that all my older rewritable disks are worthless, maybe they fail quicker.

 

[corkyg]

In line with above comments, I have a couple of spindles of DVD and CDR blanks that are several years old. Storage environment is the key here. I still use them now and then, but they have been stored in a climate controlled environment - no extremes of heat or cold.

Extreme heat is the biggest enemy. Not sure about freezing cold over time. The recordable layer is lacquer, and prolonged extreme cold could possible cause shrinkage in that layer resulting in a bad disk. I don't know for sure, but I would be suspicious.

Try 'em and see - will only cost you time.

 

[Cerb]

Of Verbatim w/ AZO, TY, and genuine Sony, no problems to date, even with discs that I have found by rummaging that are >10 years old, and not stored in any special way (like, in a box in a closet).

 

[Tsavo]

I only use (used to use) Taiyo Yuden. Brand makes a huge difference in recording quality.

I rarely use them any more. My Blu Ray burner only gets the occasional workout. HDD's are so cheap that I don't bother with anything else. I haven't burned a DVD in eons.

 

[Cerb]

I bought my last spindles 4-5 years ago, and still have over half of each. I rip all the time (I practically have an addiction to thrift store CD browsing ), but usually only burn for OSes, and even that I often use USB sticks for.

 

[Batmeat]

I don't burn cd's anymore but I still burn DL DVD and Blu-Rays. You'll only have issues if your disks are constantly submitted to temperature changes. Like +-40 degrees the little changes in temp aren't going to do squat. The big changes will warp your discs.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I'll only suggest this as a possibility for what Larry may have observed.

I have piles of unused DVD +R/W, DVD -R/W, DVD-R, CD-R, CD-R/W.

Now I can't say I've had problems with the DVDs. However, there were several brands of CD-R's I'd accumulated over a period of time from maybe 2000 through 2008. After upgrading my optical drives from earlier IDE DVD-capable to newer (and some of them just crapped out too soon) -- I discovered I could burn some of the CDs and not others. And I noticed there were slight differences in the format capacity between the brands I had.

Could it be that the hardware specification changed, making earlier brands of optical discs unusable?

Truth is -- seeing that the "Hoarding" thread I started in "General Hardware" is getting a lot of responses -- and since I only burn discs infrequently, I should probably just trash some of the older stock of these things. They take up storage space in my "Home Theater" cabinet.

And also the truth of it -- my stock of unburned optical discs increase considerably after a friend gave me several boxes of them. He had apparently seen the light much earlier, maybe six years earlier.

 

[VirtualLarry]

And also the truth of it -- my stock of unburned optical discs increase considerably after a friend gave me several boxes of them. He had apparently seen the light much earlier, maybe six years earlier.

Hmm. And I just "stockpiled" more. Lord knows why, I guess.

How big were these boxes? I've probably got two 'totes' full, and some more besides. Still have some FujiFilm MIJ media, as well as two spindles of RicohjpnR01.

At least some of my recent stock is BD-R though, which I tell myself isn't quite obsolete yet.

 

[AlienTech]

I have used decade old CD's and DVD's and they burnt just fine. But the very same disks burnt at the time would show up as empty. Some disks lost the coating so it appears transparent but some drives can still read the data which was surprising. Bacteria would eat the material inside the disks from the inside out and then you have trouble reading the disks. Original pressed disks seem to go bad like this. Once the coating in the middle of the disk is eatten, you get errors. This the layer inside the disk in the center they use to reflect the laser but I dont understand why this is a problem on pressed disks but I can still read burnt disks which had lost this reflective layer.. I can see right through the burnt disk and pulled off old data to burn to a new disk. But the original disks were unreadable. The unburnt media does not seem to have this problem although uncared for media develops black spots.. So I think good care given to unburnt media would keep the disks for many decades to be burnt again.. Just dont think you can keep backups for decades.. Although they are supposedly to stay readable for 150 years, maybe they have special disks for that. I had problems even with Kodak CD's from 15 years ago. Those are supposed to stay readable for many decades.. Just a couple of errors on the disk makes it unusable no matter how careful you are with them.. I think disks develop problems but when you burn them, either the data gets burnt or you discard the disk.. IE if a spot has problems, depending on what bits are burnt, either it will pass or fail depending on the bits.. The burning might also fix some of the developed problems. IE a spot will either be a 1 because of a defect or because it was burnt in, either way when reading it back that spot will return a 1.. Hence a blank disk will remain viable a lot longer than a burnt media. And a verify after burning will show a fail if the media has gone bad.. also the built in error correction will help there..