How long do CD's last?

[No Worries]

I was going to make a CD of some of my favorite songs for a friend. I got out a CD of Springsteen's "The River", a copy I had made in December, 1999 from a friend's prerecorded CD. It worked fine for years, but I hadn't played it in a long time. I burned it on a Memorex CD-R Recordable 74 minute premium CD. When I put it in my computer, it registered as nothing on it.

I tried it in my stereo system CD, and two portable players. All showed the CD as blank. I stored the CD in a dark, cool room. I googled it and found out that re-recordable CD's only last a year. But that regular burned CD's should last several decades. I remember seeing cheap CD's with no name so it was hard to tell which side was playable. But this was a premium CD. It's still in the original CD container. (Remember when recordable CD's each came in their own container?) It says that it could write at 8X speed. Could it have been written too slow?

I checked two other older CD's that I had copied over a decade ago, and they too were both blank. Maybe the dye went bad, but they were never exposed to sunlight, heat, or high humidity. I have cassettes that I recorded over three decades ago that still sound fine. It just pisses me off with the short life-span.

[Amber Lamps]

Just recently I found an actual cd (not copy) that had gone blank, in the case, on a shelf in my bedroom...beats me, bro.

[Rangerscott]

Could be a hardware thing. Not technically a problem but a problem within itself.

CD's and burners can get funky on themselves. I have some cd's I burnt long ago on an old burner and my new burner some times has trouble reading the disc. I've also had to problem were a new (in this time frame) cd wouldnt read on a old cd-rom drive.


Then there was a time when cd's and burners had speed limits. My old burner had an 8x speed limit and I stuck in a 16x cd and the burner wouldnt even see the cd. Weird huh.

[Homeslice]

Really depends on the quality of the disk and more importantly, the quality of the laser that wrote it.

[marko138]

Damn. I've only had problems with super shitty low quality CD's.

[pauldun170]

Cdrs (and just about any consumer level disc) should be considered as having a 5 year lifespan in ideal conditions.

[marko138]

Cdrs (and just about any consumer level disc) should be considered as having a 5 year lifespan in ideal conditions.
I've had discs way longer than 5 years that are still cranking.

[Kaneman]

What's a CD?

http://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l223/rll93/ipod_touch.jpg