So here is what happened. I would love to hear comments etc.
Back in 2001 I started a tender for digitizing a large archive of
different formats. At that time the cost of a server was out of the
question, so the decision of the archive was to save to cd-r and in 5
year's time server prices would go down low enough to buy one and
migrate whatever we digitize to that point. If you remember this was the
time frame where Mix magazine posted articles that led to a "war"
between TDK and Mitsui brands. The issue was in the end boiling down to
this, TDK had a wider range of tolerance and worked in man burners and
players, but suffered early degradation. Mitsui was more robust but did
not like all burners. The decision fell on Mitsui cd-r with the then
highly recommended plextor 4x burner just introduced. Burnt cd's were
stored in jewel boxes on shelves. The room was lit with neon lights 5
days a week from 7am to 5pm. Time has passed and then after about 6
years we started noticing that cd's would not play to the end. Audio
cd's would start out fine but would get errors toward the end that were
spaced repeatedly, with the rotation speed. Wave file would play up to
a certain point were the error rate would be to high. Trying to transfer
the file to the hard disk revealed that that inner portion of the cd was
fine and transfer rate was very high but again reaching the end of files
the speed dropped to nothing. After some tinkering but nothing precise
it was obvious that cd's that were closer to the lights were hit more
than other cd's that were in darkness. There you have it.
Shai
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