Related link: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/gipwg/StabilityStudy.pdf
Hooray! We now have better than anecdotal evidence for the quality of different types of CD-R and DVD-R media. No names have been used to protect the innocent, but NIST recently released a summary (PDF) of their work stress-testing different types of media. (/. just posted the link as well, so this may not be news to you.)
CD-R media was categorized by the coating and dye types (which are generally known). The silver + gold coating and phthalocyanine dye combo won hands down. Mitsui's gold archival CD-Rs (MAM-A) that I mentioned in a previous post fall in this category.
Unfortunately, DVD-R media was not as easy to categorize. The specifics of the dyes and coatings used in DVD-R are (apparently) pretty closely held secrets and as such, NIST declined to give any details other than to say they used three samples of commercially available media. One sample was head and shoulders above the others, but we have no way of knowing exactly which media that was. Ahh well. They do make this closing comment:
A comprehensive study is underway in a collaboration between NISTand the Library of Congress (LoC) with two principle objectives: 1) to determine the life expectancy of DVD recordable media and 2) to develop a test which media manufacturers can use to assign an archive quality grade to their product.Sounds great. Let's hope they finish it before we're all using Blu-ray and wondering how long those discs will last!
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