Choose CD-R, CD-RW media as though your data life depends on it

Office World News, Nov 1999 by Clatterbuck, Tim

According to Richard Saul Wurman, author of InformationAnxiety, the daily edition of the New York Times contains more information than your grandfather encountered in a ten-year period. To make matters worse, Wurman notes that our information supply doubles every five years. With the convergence of voice, video, and data combined with the global reach of the Internet and the Web, there is no end in sight to the volume of information you can obtain and use in your personal and business life.

Information is becoming so valuable that you can no longer simply read it and discard it. In fact, Jack Welch, chairman of General Electric, noted that an individual's ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is a persons ultimate competitive advantage. As a result, you and I store more and more information on our computers for fast, easy access.

It's no wonder that computer storage requirements grow more than 50 percent a year, and even today's hard drives with several Gigabytes are quickly filled. If logic prevailed, you would go through your files and discard the old documents, images, presentations, video clips, and data when your hard drive was close to being filled. But we all know that the day after the information is discarded, you will need the data and the time to reconstruct it will require hours or even days-which can be costly.

Rather than buy a larger hard drive, there is a better, long-term solution that is economical and easy to install. It also provides virtually unlimited capacity. It's the addition of a CD-RW drive that writes to both CD-R (write-once) and CD-RW (rewriteable) discs. The drives are very inexpensive today and software is readily available that will not only write your files to the CD media but will keep an inventory on-line of the data's location. Depending upon the CD media you purchase, 650MB discs will only cost you $1 to $10.

just a few years ago, CD media was expensive and there were only a handful of media manufacturers such as Verbatim serving a very small market.

But this year, analysts project that more than 600 million CD-R discs and more than 150 million CD-RW discs will be sold. The burgeoning demand for globally standard CD-based storage has attracted a growing number of suppliers. Today, there are more than 25 manufacturers and privatelabel producers-some reputable firms and a large number of entrepreneurial organizations that produce low-priced, inferior media with storage quality that can vary from day-to-day, disc-to-disc.

Except for the color and artwork, all of the CD-R and CD-RW discs you see when you visit a store look very similar.

If you're lucky, you_ only know the media is bad after you have stored a number of files or produced your own MP3 audio CD and tried to play them on the recorder or on another CD player. If you're unlucky, you find out that the media has gone bad six months later when you attempt to recover the data that is now stored only on the CD-R or CDRW media.

To protect themselves, buyers need to know:

* Will media from manufacturer X record at the desired speed?

* Will it perform well at that speed?

* Will the disc, once recorded, be readable on the wide variety of players available?

* Will it retain data, over time, under less than ideal conditions?

* What type of guarantee does the manufacturer provide with its product?

Despite the fact that CD-R and CDRW disc quality and capabilities can differ widely, disc costs vary by only a few cents and can store a volume of data. For example, a single 650MB CD (-R or -RW) will hold 74 minutes of audio, 45 minutes of MPEG-2 video, 5,400 photos, 50,000 or four 4-drawer filing cabinets of documents.

The time expended in gathering this much information can be substantial. For example, it could take six hours to accumulate a full CD of MP3 files before ripping.

The cost of a disc is really irrelevant. What really matters is the value of the data that will be recorded on it. How important is it? How long must it be kept? What would be the cost, in time and money, to replace it? The fact is, if data is valuable enough to be put on a CD-R or CD-RW disc, the real issue is whether the disc can be trusted-not how much it costs.

The characteristics of a recordable CD were specified in the Orange Book II standard in 1990. The technology involves changing the reflectivity of the organic dye layer (shown in Figure A). This is typically either cyanine (cyan blue in color), phthalocyanine (more or less colorless) or azo (deep blue in color). These dyes are photosensitive organic compounds, similar to those used in photography. A microscopic reflective layer-either a proprietary silvery alloy or 24-carat goldis coated over the dye. Tests show a silver reflective layer provides improved reflectivity and maximizes read/write performance. The silver/blue CD-Rs, which are manufactured with a process patented by Verbatim, combine the benefits of silver reflectivity with the increased data reliability and long archival life offered with metal azo dye (Figure B). The metalized azo layer also gives Verbatim CD-R media its unique deep blue appearance, which can be easily distinguished from the green of Cyan and gold of Phthalocyanine dyes.