Testing of commercial optical media

Data integrity is a primary concern for the users of any data storage medium. For optical data storage, the integrity is directly related to the performance and defect level of the storage media and to how they change as the media age. While media materials and thin-film stack designs are chosen with the goal of achieving high data integrity and reliability, variations in the media manufacturing processes themselves often can determine how the media will behave. These variations can be found through detailed and careful characterization testing. The authors describe some of the test methods used for characterizing rewritable media and discuss some results obtained while surveying commercially available media