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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

Raw CD-R and CR-RW's are actually still widely available for purchase. I wonder for how long though. Especially for CD-R that's an impressively long run of almost/about 30 years.

Bought a bunch of CD-R's recently to burn some retro apps/games to get that proper feeling (sound, latency).

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I still have a spindle of them kicking around mostly for legacy OS stuff like old PowerPC Mac installations. Some version of Open Firmware just do not play nice with USB's.

The issue I have is think a lot of the discs I get are hyper aged and it is a flip of a coin if they actually work or not.

Buy some fresh ones while you can.

I will be honest I have kind of given up on trying to maintain a lot of these systems. Some I am still giving love but every year it gets a little harder, particularly with weird power supplies, dying capacitors and (now) odd ball storage systems.

About 3 months ago I finally had to sacrifice a PowerMac G5 (Steve Jobs Folly as I called it), I kept the case and it is now a semi-sleeper PC but the original G5 board was dead as a dodo and not willing to go any further. The heat sinks on that thing was intense!

I hope for a while yet. My car has a 6 cd changer :-D

There's car stereos for literally under $15 shipped these days. I'm not exactly recommending those models, but car stereos are generally quite affordable and easy to install. Something to consider

They're usually garbage at that price point. The thing about a CD-changer though is that it usually guarantees that your existing system has a line-in for other devices.

But sometimes the integration requires you to have a donor audio CD constantly playing even though you've spliced into the audio feed.

Do many cars still have a single height "head-unit" space available in them these days? My wife's 2017 Hyundai doesn't. The last car I had that could accommodate a 3rd party head-unit install was a 2004 Subaru, and it required buying manuf. replacement bevel for where the OEM clock went IIRC. Maybe latest car stereos are just entirely headless?

Companies like scosche make plastics to adapt some cars, most popular older cars with cd players or changers would be able to be upgraded to a mechless head unit without too much hassle.

Modern cars all seem to have integrated units. Even before but LCDs were the norm, so that's not a sole excuse :-/

(fyi it is my 2004 wrx that has a double din cd changer. I go car shopping every year or two, and I stick with my trusty Scooby every time :)

Oh gawd no.

I have predictable functional big buttons and levers to do what I need. The $200 units (let alone cheaper ones) have 2mm buttons and a freaking remote control! Do not get me started on modern car UI :-)))

As best I can tell from my recent interest, Verbatim is the only CD-RW name brand in the US market. [0] It may be the old Mitsubishi formulation and reliable. But the brand has changed hands over the years.

CD-R’s are more widely available.

[0] I acquired a Roland device from 2001 that is particular about CD-RW’s. No name disc’s don’t work in it but they format fine with a new external DVD burner…hence the rabbit hole that led to this submission.

Weren't CD+RWs considered the better format? Maybe this is just my experience with a first-gen xbox that makes me think this.

Makes sense, I think Verbatim were also the last ones producing DVD-RAM. I still have a handful of their hardcoat ones, they are like using a big stable floppy disk, no need for any kind of burning software you can literally format them to any filesystem.

CD-R's I bought a distributor case of Taiyo Yudens back in like the early-2000's, I have a few hundred left and use them in legacy stuff sometimes. They didn't get cd rot, all the CMC Magnetics CD-R disks (produced under many names) suffered cd rot within 10 years.

They're still available, but I prefer getting writable discs with higher capacity, like DVD-R or BD-R. I still use my DVD-R as one of my offline backup methods (make an ISO, put a bunch of files and a sha256sum file on the disc).

That is amazing since thumb drives are much cheaper by the MB and less prone to degredation

I'm guessing this product line is kept alive by outdated local government/municipality regulations or something along the lines of that. Oh, and owners of cars with CD players :).

About now is probably the time to hoard.

I needed my x-ray form the hospital, they gave me a CD. It actually kind of makes sence - they aren't gonna keep stacks of USB drives,.

The fact that it's WORM media also makes sense for medical images, where you really don't want them to be editable.

My hospital distributed all my CT, PET and MRI imagery on DVD. When I had to travel cross country to a specialist, I'd ripped them all and brought a thumb drive - which the new hospital refused to deal with. I had to stay up all night burning a set of DVDs for them from the the iso images. (And even though I had them all available via dropbox - the hospital didn't allow access to the internet at large.)

Sounds like the hospital had their infosec well in hand. That's rare.

Add in autoplay.inf to the burned CD, and we'll see...

While both types of removable media represent a risk of malware, a USB device represents a very real electronic threat of damage to equipment. You can easily inspect a CD-ROM or DVD disc and confirm that it is what it claims to be. You cannot inspect most USB thumb drives without destroying them, and they could be disguised keyboards, keyloggers, wireless exfiltration, or device destruction devices.

I am really sort of annoyed by the step backwards we've taken from tapes and optical discs into "this really smart device that happens to store data wants to interface with as many computers as possible". It's icky for those who instinctively understand and practice good infosec hygiene.

I think the "step backwards" is largely due to the rise of flash memory, which requires an electrical interface. That said, electrical destruction aside, the threat of removable media "becoming something else" is avoided if you use dedicated storage interfaces instead of USB, like SD/TF/MMC/etc.

>>less prone to degredation

Are they, over time? I always assumed thumb drives would rot after years let alone decades.

I have CD-Rs that I burned 20 years ago that are still readable. I would say this is the majority of disks.

I have a box of thumb drives that are between 10 and 20 years old... less than half of them even register, let alone read anything. And often those that do quickly die.

Not only that but if you budget for an expected error rate of let's say 10% you can use par2 to create additional files that add that redundancy to your archives. par2 default redundancy is set to 5%. PAR2 uses Reed-Solomon Coding to perform its calculations.

https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline

yup, that's what I do for my longterm archives.

BTW, new hardware instruction optimized version: https://github.com/animetosho/par2cmdline-turbo/

Soon we will be able to recreate the entire feeling in VR, sound and latency included

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