Archiving

2003-06-18 22:10:16

Does anyone know which DVD brand is the best as far as Archiving?  I got a whole bunch of MPC's I wanna put on a few DVD disks, but I wanna know which DVD brand will hold up over the years rather then take my chances and buy some brand that will be dead in 5 years or so.  Also I was wondering why don't blank CD-R's don't work on stand-alone CD burners(not a relevent question but something worth asking  since I can't find anything about it)? And when i mean blank i'm talking about both sides there must be a way around it.

Archiving

Reply #1 – 2003-06-19 01:35:37

There are no DVDs that are "universally good". First, it depends on the DVD burner. If the firmware is optimized for one type of DVD, you may better results with those ones, even if they don't work good with other burners. Also, the quality is fluctuating, since the manufacturers are optimizing their DVD production process all the time. Anyway, according to c't magazine, those are good ones for DVD-R:

Maxell DVD-R 4x
Pioneer DVD-R 4x
Universal DVD-R 4x (Ritek)

They tested with two DVD burners, Pioneer DVR-A05 and Sony DRU-500A, and the Pioneer one always gave better results.

Do not buy: Princo DVD-R 4x or Verbatim DVD-R 4x.

Archiving

Reply #2 – 2003-06-22 00:43:18

Slightly off the mark - but along the same topic of this forum....

I am saving all my APE (as in Monkey's Audio) files to CDs for archiving. I am using a NEC DV-5800A drive which came pre-installed on my Dell. I burn to TDK CD-Rs.

My question is, given that my drive is not the ultimate (but works great), can I lose data when transferring these files to and from my CD and hard drive? I'm not referring to 'ripping' which I use EAC to catch all errors. I'm referring to just transferring data files. The reason I ask, is that someday, I plan to copy the APEs back to the hard drive, de-compress to WAV and compress to MP4 when the codec is more mature. I want to make sure I have all of the 'original' sound when I do this.

Anyone know the answer to this question?

Archiving

Reply #3 – 2003-06-22 05:34:31

I had an ASUS A7V133 MB that was causing random file corruption on the hard drive and hense this would also get transfered to CD - and It is always possible that there are some errors. If everything works well it is usually quite rare but nevertheless.

You might want to create a MD5 file on the hard drive of the ape file, then burn it with the ape file onto a CD and run it from the CD. The MD5 file will check the intergrity of the file to make sure it is indentical to the original.

I like using Easy MD5 Creator