Abusing CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, and BD-Rs for Science

I’ve been on an optical media kick lately, having a grand old time burning discs and whatnot. One bit of advice that consistently comes up: don’t let your burned discs get exposed to sunlight; the dye layer is UV after all, and since the sun is a deadly laser it can damage your precious bits. Naturally, this advice needs to be tested to determine what actually happens if you disregard it. I had a friendly LLM shart out some scripts to generate max-size iso images and sha256sum them from the disc, and burned using k3b: Verbatim CD-R (at max speed, 40x) Verbatim CD-RW (at max speed, 40x) Verbatim DVD-R (at max speed, 16x) I also have a second DVD-R that long story short had 615 buffer underruns while burning. It passed verification, but it seemed like a poor test subject. I exposed it though because it would be interesting if using Burnfree made it degrade faster Verbatim BD-R (at max speed, 12x) The CD and DVD were burned with a brand new (old stock) Hitachi-LG data storage GHD0N, the…