OT: A cautionary tale about CD life

riredale wrote on 8/15/2007, 7:32 PM

I was shocked to discover today that 3 audio CD-Rs bought in the late 1990's were unreadable by any of my devices.

They have been kept in ideal storage, with a constant cool temperature and darkness. What they all had in common was that they were all the "GQ" ("Great Quality") brand, purchased from Fry's around 1998. Two of them have a white painted finish, and the third has a matte-silver finish. The burned side is dark green in color and the burn area is quite obvious, but Windows reports that the disks are unreadable.

The good news is that I have many other disks that age or older that are holding up quite well. None of them are GQ.

Perhaps "GQ" really stands for "Gone Quickly."

Comments

farss wrote on 8/15/2007, 9:02 PM

If it matters put it on MAM archival grade gold media. Storing it in archive boxes also should help.

john-beale wrote on 8/15/2007, 9:07 PM

There are certainly differences between individual CDs and DVDs. I tried some "Great Quality" DVDs from Fry's when I first got my Plextor 712A that can measure error rates. The GQ discs had by far the highest error rate of any discs I'd tried (5 different brands) and that was immediately after burning, without storage effects or passage of time. However you can do a web search and find out what other people think, eg.
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/199741

I have never seen GQ on a list of top quality or most recommended media.

rstein wrote on 8/18/2007, 2:47 PM

Yeah. My experience is that everything sold at Fry's seems to last through a warranty period and then dies. I built about eight systems for a client in the early 90s from components, some from Fry's. The Fry's components - motherboards, peripheral cards, and CRTs invariably died within 2 years, where similar components purchased from other retailers happily continued working for years.

Small sample size, I know. But my experience taught me to limit purchases there to things (brand name tape backup carts, for example) that were unlikely to be second tier B stock.

Buying a no-name brand like "GQ" media from Fry's is just inviting disaster.

An examination of any Better Business Bureau site in areas where Fry's stores are will confirm that place is the pits for consumers. Caveat Emptor!!!

Bob.

fldave wrote on 8/18/2007, 5:27 PM

I lost a bunch of old data from CD and DVD backups a couple of years ago. I use just hard drives now. I immediately copied all backup CDs and DVDs I had to to the backup hard drive. A few discs were unreadable. I then copied my real time data to that new drive. Then I bought another drive to backup my backup drive.

So now I have:

1 - Real time data on each machine
2 - Backup Drive - data from each of 3 machines
3 - backup of #2

#1 gets copied every few days to #2, or on demand
#2 gets copied every few days to #3

3 copies of everything, available immediately.

Terry Esslinger wrote on 8/18/2007, 5:47 PM

Along the same line - an interesting read...
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,107607,00.html

riredale wrote on 8/19/2007, 12:19 AM

Rstein:

My rant about the GQ CDs was not meant to be a critique of Fry's. Actually I love the place, and I've never had any issues about the quality of any components purchased there. To my knowledge they carry regular merchandise, and I've bought so many motherboards, hard drives, cases, and memory from them that my wife only half-jokingly suggests we should buy stock in the company. Their returns policy is pretty generous, too.

But I think the "GQ" brand is junk.