Burn slower or risk data loss, warns Microsoft
Microsoft has warned public beta testers to burn downloaded Vista ISOs to disc at speeds as slow as 1X or 2X in order to get a reliable burn.
It says a key reason behind installation failure of Vista is that many DVD burners cannot reliably burn a disc at high speed.
The interesting tidbit was included in the release notes for the interim update to Vista Beta 2 (build 5456.5; not publicly available) and sheds light on the magnitude of the problem of unreliable DVD burns:
When burning your DVD’s please do so at 1x or 2x and CRC them when done using the CRC utility posted on the Connect site. The customer experience improvement telemetry that we’ve been getting back on Beta 2 shows that not quite three quarters of setup failures are the result of a failure to read from the media. Testing shows that burning at slower speeds greatly increases the chances of a good burn.
It has been the subject of rumour for a long time that DVD burning is a risky way of backing up data because the organic dye layers used in the disc are just that — organic. They decompose over time so that patches of a burned disc may become unreadable.
But it has been difficult to get a picture for exactly how great the problem is: the CATS DVD analysers required to scientifically test burned DVDs are rare and incredibly expensive.
But this sort of data from Microsoft is helpful: statistical analysis on such a wide base of people shows that data integrity on optical discs is a significant problem even as soon as a disc is burned.
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