CD's not lasting 20 months?

Fri Aug 29 14:34:02 GMT 2003 CD's not lasting 20 months?

CD's and DVD's are suppposed to have a useful life of decades, but apparently not: http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/7751

The problem, of course, is that the testing that manufacturers do is based on heat formulas that say if you raise the temperature 10 degrees Celsius, most chemical reactions speed up twice as fast. So they use elevated temperatures and short time periods and backtrack the results to arrive at these figures. As we all know, you can't always trust that kind of calculation: you can't necessarily cook food twice as fast by raising the temperature. It works the other way too, of course, some things just aren't going to slow down just because you drop the temperature.

If you are depending on a long shelf life for CD's you create (CD's you buy are made by an entirely different process), you may need to rethink how often you will need to refresh the data onto new media.

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