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A few years back I bought a couple of assorted batch lots off eBay from people selling out of an old collection, or just selling an old collection wholesale. Some new discs still in the cellophane, too - mostly Neige, but I have a couple of Color Club ones in there somewhere. I still have my own small collection bought with high school summer-job money, too. And I have exactly one Hi-MD disc, that came with the MZ-RH1 I bought for ripping - an accident, I think that must have been, since the price I paid matched other player-only sales and didn't include the $60 or so that Hi-MD discs were going for around the same time. Most failures I've seen have been mechanical, whether due to mistreatment by a prior owner or, with a couple of the TDK ones I bought as a kid, the glue that holds the case window in growing brittle with age. The media itself, like flash memory, is perishable with enough write cycles, and I think I've run into two discs so far that were mechanically sound but unreadable. Certainly I never had that kind of failure back in the day, and I must've rewritten some of those discs a few dozen times - they weren't cheap then, and summer-job money only stretches so far. Certainly if there are any common failure modes comparable to sticky-shed syndrome, I haven't run into them. Granted, it's been a couple of years; I wrapped most of the really intensive research once I got my ripping setup in place a little while before the pandemic kicked off. (For unencumbered full-quality digital ripping, you need an MZ-RH1 specifically, plus SonicStage iirc 3.4.3 and some drivers I had to dig a bit to find. I keep meaning to rehost that stuff somewhere along with a howto, but there's lots of other ways I have to spend my time of late - I'd be happy to hand the whole package off as a zipfile with my notes, if someone were interested.) So I might be overlooking something at this point, especially without referring to notes, but my overall impression is entirely that, given a working recorder or player, all or nearly all of your discs should still be perfectly usable. |