This CDR, first burned as a multisession CD April 21,1998 and last added to on Nov 18,1999, is still readable without errors on June 9, 2007!

It has been a while since I updated my CDR FAQ and a lot has changed since then. The original FAQ is still available, but I think the original purpose for which it was written has long been accomplished, though it would probably be overstating the case to say that My FAQ had much to do with it.

Back in 1998, few people had CD writers and IDE connected drives selling for less than $300 were a recent development. Also, Zip^tm and Jazz^tm drives were being heavily marketed for purposes for which CDRs were much better suited. Why, for example, would you want to backup your hard drive on media that is more expensive and LESS reliable than the hard drive itself?

Well, heavy marketing may bring some initial success, but if a product just isn't suitable for its intended use, it will ultimately fall out of favor and be replaced by a superior product. It's not surprising, then, that Jazz disks never really became all that popular and while Zip disks were pretty popular for a while among people who needed more capacity than a floppy could offer and had no better alternative, their reliability issues and low capacity (compared to a CDR) led to them becoming a quickly fading memory of the early years of home and small office computing.

Likewise, a product which which is superior in many ways will ultimately succeed despite the lack of heavy marketing. So it isn't surprising that CDR has become so popular and universally accepted even though nobody ever produced a heavy advertising campaign promoting it. [the closest thing to that was the advertising campaign from Apple when they started putting CD writers in their computers years after it had become a standard accessory in Windows machines!]

This is still the best way to label jewell cases, but as we shall see, the method chosen for labelling the CD itself could impact the archival stability of your disks!

As I predicted back in 1998, CDRs are now available in grocery stores and writers are a standard feature in new computers. The price of CDRs has stabilized at about 20¢ each in spindles of 100 and the writing speed never went much beyond 52X. Drives often sell for less than $30 but rarely less than $20.

Now that I've said all that you might be asking "What is there to write about?" Well, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, things have changed and are still changing. Though CD writers and media aren't getting cheaper or faster, conventional CD writers are quickly becoming a thing of the past, replaced by a newer technology that had been lurking in the shadows for years and then suddenly burst into prominence taking consumers and several industries by surprise!

In the pages that follow I will looking deeper into some the interesting, and even exciting, changes that are taking place including DVD writers, DVD recorders (not the same thing!), Blu-ray , new media types, new ways of packaging and labelling (including Lightscribe^tm) and will even take a look at the controversy surrounding the long term achival stability of CDR.

Part two