A Dismal Picture of CD Reliability

In his Q&A column, James Coates hears from a reader who figures his CD-RW usually fails after about 25 writes, despite the industry promise that CD-RW can be overwritten about 1,000 times. Mr. Coates paints a dismal picture of both CD-R and CD-RW reliability, in which each attempt at writing is just a roll of the data corruption dice. He ends by advising making a hard disk backup of anything you put on CD -- which is not an encouraging note for anyone who thought they were making a safe copy of their hard disk data on CD!

You can read his entire column online.

July 06, 2004July