I was going to post more frequently but due to the increased stress of the mobile game app development in college has made me forget about the data storage mediums post time until it was too late, might be a good idea to pre-prepare my posts so that they can go out on time without much work needed on the day of posting to minimize stress.
I do like collecting various data storage media and seeing what I have on my wall but it’s the preparation of my posts that is tedious, the sharing itself is fun as I like to share my latest acquisitions even if you guys don’t care that much, the people that don’t care too much and want my infrequent posts gone, please point me to a better sub to share my latest data storage media which could be r/vintagecomputing but I’m not sure if they would appreciate it but since I’m doing the backup tapes the most, then they might appreciate seeing what I am putting up as it’s relevant to their stuff.
Today I don’t have much to share, I found a blue CD-R in the bottom of one of his many spindles my dad had which I thought was a myth or just in America as every CD-R I came across at home and work experience was green so I reasonably assumed they didn’t exist (stupid, I know as I see lots of posts talking about them comparing them to the green/silver ones) or could not be found in the UK.
The main difference was in the quality of the disc, there is a third color which is gold/silver that I don’t have yet and assume to be very rare to find, these gold/silver discs uses a dye called Phthalocyanine which are of the highest quality and will 99.99999% of chance will not screw up and waste a disc during burning which was good for archival purposes which needed reliable discs and in cases where a factory stamped appearance (very small batches of special edition music discs without making a master and hogging a production line) is needed.
The next step down in quality are blue discs which uses a dye called Azo which people can buy if they want longevity but not for the steep prices that I assume the gold/silver discs commanded back then, they have a slightly lower step in quality but gives a nice shade of blue and is readable in most of the fussiest CD drives out there.
The final step down in quality are green discs which uses a dye called Cyanine which is of the lowest quality and may fail a disc or two every 10 discs, these discs are the worst discs you can buy which will rot over time and you will lose data stored on these discs but are good if you have a tight budget (pocket money) or want a use case disc for exchanging software at a piracy convention or to install some software on a legacy machine that only needs to be used once or twice at most.
There is a final undiscussed CD-R format which is ablative, there isn’t much on the web about it and not much is known about it, the only mention was an Archive.org archived website (sparse but the tabs and hyperlinks provided small morsels of information and one picture to give a brief overview) as I was doing my research on the different types of CD-R, all we know is that it was used in businesses and datacenters for backing up huge volumes of data in a compact way without using the massive Plasmon LM-xxxx, Sony writable disk (WD) or Kodak 6800 (these large format optical disks are my white whales which would be amazing to find one anywhere or have anyone give me one (found Plasmon LM-4000, CRVdisc and a hyper rare LaserRecorder re-recordable disk cartridge on eBay commanding high prices for their rarity) and if a drive shows up in any condition for any disc, I’ll take it as they are rarer then platinum nuggets in a common UK garden) ablative disks which need a large drive and media which some places might not have the space for and to have a full height drive that fits easily into a PC, these discs didn’t come in a caddy for burning as the laser can come up close and personal to the disc to etch the pits and lands with a lower power laser but when it’s time to put them away, that’s when they get put into a caddy which gets used by read only drives which are significantly cheaper than burners, these discs had hard sectors like DVD-RAM which was cool to look at.
Also, final thing, RIP Foone’s Twitter account, it has gone private which is a massive shame as it was my main source of information about extremely rare data storage formats that she/they was able to obtain and take good pictures of them and the associated drives, sent a follow request but that has gone unanswered unfortunately, her account is: https://x.com/Foone if you wanted to see and give an attempt if you are interested
Thank you for reading this Friday‘s post and I hope you have a great day, if you have any queries, thoughts about the format, additional information or to point out a mistake, please put them in the comments :)
Link to previous post, post 12 (29th week):My data storage mediums, post 12 (29th week) : r/DataHoarder
This is the best picture I managed to capture of the color difference
I like the label design of this disc, feels very high quality/luxury to me, looks like a goldish silver CD-ROM if looked at directly but at an angle reveals the text and lines
That’s where it goes, will be doing the same with the mini discs and if I ever acquire the gold/silver one, I will do a “trifecta” triangle with the gold/silver disc on top for both of all 3 are available for the mini size
