John Whittingham mused:
>
> > That part of the industry is all screwed up, as far as this consumer
> > is concerned... Each vendor seemingly has a different way of doing
> > things. That's got to stop!
>
> Erm, no it all conforms to one standard, honest.
It's no worse than it was back in the old days with floppy drives;
in fact it's a great deal better. Quite apart from the three orders
of magnitude increase in storage capacity, CDs are far less prone
to mysterious bit-rot overnight. I've got some CDs that were written
almost ten years ago, and so far I've had no problems reading them;
the same is not true for some of my floppies from that same period.
(I don't know if I've tried reading anything much older than that,
but I might have one lying around somewhere - I've had access to a
CD burner since the days when they cost around $6,000 apiece, and
a single blank CD was over $10).
A few simple precautions greatly reduce the chance of problems.
o Buy media with a name you recognise. It might cost you twice
as much up front, but nowadays that's still only pennies.
I'm mostly using Maxell and Verbatim myself.
o The same applies to hardware. If you don't recognise the
name on the box, ask yourself if the saving is worth it.
o Write everything at once as a single session, close the
session, and run a verification pass. On some drives it
is also a good idea to limit the write speed to something
slightly slower than the maximum claimed by the device.
o For data that is important, check you can read the files back
on a different drive. Just like floppy drives, a CD burner
can gradually wander away from spec. But it will still be
able to read the CDs that it writes, so if you don't check
occasionally you'll never know there is a problem brewing.
