Hello,This night I was trying to backup my source code, emails, websites and information to a DVD.This time I wanted to make 100% sure that every bit was verified and tested.Out of 5 DVD's WinRar reported 4 DVD's as bad/corrupted/crc32 errors !Only one DVD came through 100% perfect as far as I can tell... another DVD came very close 99.999999% perfect... but still an unexplained and undetected bit error somewhere... only the DVD copieing program detected it... I want to be 100% sure so this second one doesn't count.That's a failure rate of 80% !I tried the following:1. Burning at 4 MByte/Sec.2. Burning at 12 MByte/Sec.3. Burning at 16 MByte/Sec.4. Blowing the drive clean a little bit.5. Lowering the fans on the PC case... this seemed to help a little bit or maybe it was a fluck of luck... this DVD was 100% ok ?!?6. Listening on the table to see if under neighbours or cars/trucks driving by where making noise.I noticed the IBM/Hitachi Harddisk do make quite some noise/vibrations on the wooden table.7. Disconnected internet.Maybe harddisk/filesystem a little bit fragmented... by the buffers seemed to remain full... the read buffer in nero remained above 90% full...The dvd burner (benq) did seem to drop to 23% at occasions.One dvd had a little bit of crease and had the most errors. (Wrote with waterpen on it before burning the rest after).All other dvd's came clean out of the sony cakebox.I feel lucky and blessed that I at least got one good DVD out of this experiment and necessary backup.Let this posting be a warning message to those programmers and other people out there thinking about using DVD's as backup mediums !Always verify the DVD... but that's not enough !One DVD still came through "verified" by the DVD writing program... however WinRar still reported corruption.Another explanation could be that some of my RAM chips might be corrupted/defect... however shouldn't I have noticed that by now ?!?I also tried extracting the originals on the harddisk... and no bit...

Anyway... what I would need for good backup purposes on DVD's is something better than WinRar.I need some sort of compression tool, which does do compression... but which also adds redundancy...So that it can at least recover from single bit errors ?!? (Maybe even multiple bit errors ?!?)Just detecting bit errors like WinRar does is not really enough... since bit errors seems to happen more often than not.Does such a "compression/redundancy tool" already exist ?!?Bye, Skybuck.

4 out of 5 Burned Sony Data DVD's contains CRC error ?!?

Oct 30, 2009 21 Replies

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Robert Baer 16 years ago

...a dry one does not work too well; such pens need an OS update..

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T 16 years ago

Google did a study on RAM issues. It turns out that the memory on consumer grade (and even enterprise grade) gear suffers numerous errors. They traced it down to the memory controllers and not the memory modules themselves.

In other words, crappy motherboard design.

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