I had about 6 old (but brand new, cello-sealed in jewel case) Sony CD-R's sitting in a dusty corner. Old stuff - 6X max write speed. So I figure I'll use'em up making some backups of some programming work I've been doing lately.
I crack those babies open and look at the media side and there's a greenish gunge creeping all over the surface rendering them unusable. The gunge had a texture to it, not smooth like the normal media surface. Not rough like sandpaper, but you could feel that it wasn't as smooth as the un-gunged part of the surface.
Its not like I've been storing them out in the back yard buried under a pile of leaves with the lizards or something, they'd just been sitting on the shelf in the Batcave.
I tried washing the gunge off with dish soap and warm water. No joy. This gunge is apparently a permanent sort of gunge.
What the heck is this stuff? I feel like I'm living in the X-Files.
Whoa... I have no frickin' clue. Some kind of mold?
ReplyDeleteBoogers?
ReplyDeleteCD's are not fond of dampness and have been know to corrode when exposed to damp and corrosive air, I also read of some batches having a faulty plastic formulation that actually ate away the aluminium layer that forms the data retention layer.
ReplyDelete