Saturday, March 11, 2017

Your Old CD-ROMs Are Probably Rotting

Do any of you guys even still use CD-ROMs any more, let alone store data on them? I have a few sitting around here but I can't even remember the last time I even used my DVD drive for anything.

The study involved taking a trove of discarded/duplicate CD-ROMs from the LoC's collection and subjecting them to "accelerated aging" processes to see how many errors emerged as the media aged. Keeping discs dry and cool helped reduce error rates, but even so there's a lot of bitrot there.