CD-R Care

[Some advice from forum member SteveG:-]

Some advice from forum member SteveG:-

Okay, who thinks that the underneath is the side you really have to be careful with? Well, it's certainly the side that gets put on things and seems most likely to get fingermarks and scratches, etc on. But actually, it's the label side you should really be looking out for, because this is really the business side of the disk. The dye layer is covered by a thin metallic coating, and a 'protective' layer that's only 5-10 micrometers thick, and brittle. Damage this, and atmospheric pollutants like sulphur will corrode the metallising. So you should be careful what you write on the label with - use only recommended pens (they are quite easy to find) and beware of labels. It has been reported that the glue in some labels can interact with the protective coating over a long period of time. No more info on this at present. On some disks, just a careless fingernail scratch on the top can render chunks of the disk unreadable. Remember - the data is just under the label.

So what about the Polycarbonate that the disk is made of? It's not as indestructible as you might think. Some quite surprising things can cause it to degrade, in fact. For a start, it can absorb water molecules, but washing it's fine as long as you dry it afterwards. The oils in your skin (fingerprints), and in fact any organic compounds can also cause long-term degradation, as can exposure to the sun (BIG no-no!). The other thing that you shouldn't do is flex and bend the disks. This can micro-crack the polycarbonate and the metallising and increase the error rate significantly.

Oh, and to cap it all, apparently the shelf-life of any unwritten blank is between 5-10 years, if it's stored correctly.

Now, just how stable is that dye?