But What About Platinum?

News of the day:

A recent discussion on Slashdot has revealed some information that I’d been meaning to research for a while now: CD-R/RW media reliability. It’s apparently mostly dependent on three factors: dye lifetime, the reflective metal, and proper adhesion.

The best dye is phthalocyanine, with cyanine in second place and metal azo as the worst. For the metal layer, gold is best due to a higher reflectivity (closer to pressed CDs, for better compatibility in players) and resistance to corrosion, with silver in second place. And adhesion is simply how well it’s glued together, with no leaks or weak spots, and just varies from brand to brand.

So, for the absolute best reliability, you want phthalocyanine/gold discs. They can be a bit more expensive though ($1 USD per disc is what I’ve seen quoted). What I might wind up doing is dividing my files into three categories: essential, important files, which will be archived on the phthalocyanine/gold discs; the common, non-essential files, for which phthalocyanine/silver or cyanine/silver are good enough; and the ‘whatever’ files, things like videos and music burned merely for convenience, where any el-cheapo brand will do.

(Though I do still plan to move to DVDs, I’ll probably still archive some stuff on CDs just for extra reliability and redundancy.)