Diamonds are forever, but unfortunately optical recordable media is not. Few years ago DVD recordable media was expensive and lower quality, recorders were not as good as today, 4x recording speed was considered fast. Many people however have valuable data recorded on DVDs few years ago, but have you checked the condition of your few years old media?

As recordable media was very expensive, people were keen on checking out the cheaper offers on the market. I personally bought a few spindles of MAM Mitsui 4x DVD-R media from a German online store three years ago, back in 2004. Mitsui was a very high quality brand in CD-R recording, so I trusted the same brand in the DVD-R even though the Mitsui media was sold as MAM-E - Media Advanced Manufacturing Europe.

At first the MAM-E Mitsui media was performing quite well. There was no error rate scanning methods available at the time, but discs recorded fine using my NEC ND-1300A recorder and the playback was flawless in any device I tried: PC, PlayStation 2 or DVD player. But as couple of years passed, I started noticing the that PS2 was starting to have problems reading these discs and the DVD playback started skipping in my DVD player. The discs were showing definite signs of aging

Below is an error rate scan of a MAM-E Mitsui recorded three years ago, in early 2004. This discs started skipping so badly in my DVD player, that the content was not watchable any more.

As we can see, the disc has severely degraded from beginning to the end, showing an enormous amount of errors. The physical condition of the disc is flawless, with no scratches or stains. The disc has always been properly stored and not been exposed to sunlight. Unfortunately I cannot do a comparison how well does this media performed right after recording, but the playback performance was flawless as pointed out before.

Luckily modern DVD-ROM and DVD-R drives are very good at reading media, and I was still able to copy the content using my PC to a new disc, even though the reading speed of the disc was significantly reduced, indicating the amount of errors and that the LITEON SOHW-1653S has some problems reading the degraded disc as well. Data however was not lost in this case, but it was a close call.

The lesson of this story is to check your media archives from time to time. Some media performs flawlessly right after recording, but can show signs of degrading very rapidly. It does not necessarily take years, it can only be a matter of weeks! Few years ago recorders and media were not as good as they are today (and even today there is bad quality media in the market). Do check the media fro playback performance, and perform some random error rate scans. Make backups to high quality media if the recorded data is valuable and if you find signs of media aging. This way you will avoid a nasty surprise of losing your valuable data