I have a number of commercial CD's from the early-mid 90's that have developed... holes in the recording medium. It's definitely not a scratch but rather what looks to be the deterioration of the "metal" part. My only guess is that keeping them in a CD folio in my car overheated them. :-\

Accidentally left a home burnt CD-R on the dashboard of my truck, burnt side UP, didn't use the truck for about a month. CD is kaput.

JP

Best practices for maximizing CD life:

- use quality medium only (Tayo Yuden, Verbatim, Mitshubishi), avoid cheap media - what you pay for is what you get. Don't get fooled by the label, check the producer code, most burning software can read it. (TY & MMC are the ones to go for)

- burn at low speed. Forget 16x or 24x speeds, go as low as your burner/media allows (4x)

- use quality equipment for burning. Plextor is obviously the king, but NEC/Panasonic makes very good ones. Forget the Koreans (LG, Samsung) and no-names

- store in their jewel case away from heat and sun

- if the excretum hits the ventillation system, it's time to take out those Korean made drives. LGs can often read data from CD's that other drives give up on. Than you can salvage your data.

After quite a bit of research, I ended up buying the Samsung SH-S203B. The fanatics at cdfreaks (the FT of the CD/DVD world) concur with it as the top pick.

http://www.cdfreaks.com/devices/

Using TY media, I've yet to create a coaster, have anything but superb error rates, or had any problems at all.

cdfreaks is also the place to learn about media, disc verification tools, etc.

I agree, CDFreaks is THE place

There are fake media codes out there, too. :)