Yes, media quality is a big deal with older drives. I think that as newer drives became more tolerant, the quality of discs that were commonly sold in stores declined. Good CDs became a "premium" niche and most people didn't seek those out. People generally don't notice the difference because they don't see the low level errors that are automatically corrected by the drive, and they don't notice if the burner is relying on "BurnProof" or similar during the burning process.

Back when JVC / Taiyo Yuden announced the closure of the Japan plant (and sale of the company to CMC Magnetics), I went a little nuts and stockpiled 900 TY CDRs. Today's CMC Taiyo Yuden discs might still be just as good and it sounds like you've had a good result from them.
I also bought 100 of another brand (whose name I don't remember) which came in 650MB capacity instead of 700MB. Not sure if the 650MB discs will ever be needed but I wanted to have them around as an option.

Occasionally you might see old spindles of good CDRs in thrift stores. I got a partial spindle of old Sony CDRs that way and a few individually packaged (ie ancient) TDK 650MB. A good generic indicator is to look for "Made in Japan" on the packaging. Japanese plants made good CDs, not cheap ones.
CDs don't last forever but it depends how they were stored. They like to be cool, dry, and dark. I've had good luck with old CDs here in CA but we have lower humidity than a lot of places.

CMC is a garbage company. I'd be shocked if their "Taiyos" were as good

Try Memorex CD-R, they compatible with any old drives as well as with Sega Saturn. Verbatim CD-R is bad choice.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-09-15, 13:55:

CMC is a garbage company. I'd be shocked if their "Taiyos" were as good

They have excellent optical media. Using early CD-burners (1x, 2x, 4x), they were the only discs I could use that wouldn't fail a burn when performing a validation. I've also had zero issues with compabitility of burned media on old single/dual/quad speed IDE and SCSI CD-ROMs in my old systems.

wiretap wrote on 2020-09-15, 15:53:

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-09-15, 13:55:

CMC is a garbage company. I'd be shocked if their "Taiyos" were as good

They have excellent optical media. Using early CD-burners (1x, 2x, 4x), they were the only discs I could use that wouldn't fail a burn when performing a validation. I've also had zero issues with compabitility of burned media on old single/dual/quad speed IDE and SCSI CD-ROMs in my old systems.

REAL Taiyo Yuden discs are indeed excellent. Taiyo Yuden the company no longer exists, they sold the brand name to CMC. Again, I'd be shocked if CMC can maintain the manufacturing process to the same standard

MAZter wrote on 2020-09-15, 14:00:

Try Memorex CD-R, they compatible with any old drives as well as with Sega Saturn. Verbatim CD-R is bad choice.

I'm not sure if Memorex ever made CDRs, they just pay somebody to print their name on stuff. 😀
The retail branding is usually meaningless, especially with commodity priced discs that change suppliers randomly.
The same goes for cheap Verbatims, but I think the "Datalife Plus" discs might still be made by Mitsubishi Chemical (sister company of Verbatim). At least they used to be.
Some software tools can tell you what the discs actually are.

Up until recently Taiyo Yuden was their own manufacturer and also a supplier to other brands ("Made in Japan" often meant it was their discs). Now CMC owns the brand but has tried to maintain the TY specs. They might still have a separate plant for the TY discs (not sure), so in that sense they may still be their own manufacturer. I've only used the Japanese TYs so no opinion on the new ones.

If using an older burner (not just an old reader), there's one more thing to keep in mind. To get the best burn quality you want the drive's firmware to have a burn strategy that's correct for the discs you're using. If the burner doesn't recognize the ATIP code of the discs then it uses a generic strategy which will yield way more low level errors in the burn. The disc will still work but the reader has to correct more errors, and as the disc ages it probably won't be as robust as one that had a better burn to start with. There are software tools that can scan for the quality of a burn, but that gets complicated since it also depends on what drive you use for scanning.
Popular "premium" discs tend to maintain compatibility with very old ATIP codes that are well supported by almost everything. That's something Taiyo Yuden was good about, and I wonder how well it's been maintained now that they're no longer being made in the same factory.

I ran into that problem with some cheap Ritek DVD+Rs once. I had an older Pioneer DVD burner (I think it was 12X?) with ATA interface which was "obsolete" by then but I was perfectly happy with it. Quality scans showed that my burn quality on those discs was lousy. Then I tested the same discs on a newer drive (which I had no real interest in using) and it's results were way better. So I gave the discs away to somebody with a newer burner.
When I fed the Pioneer with some TY 8X discs, which were a legacy "premium" product, then the quality was excellent so there was nothing wrong with the drive, it was just a compatibility issue.

My own experiences. The oldest CD-ROM drive in my collection is a Toshiba XM-3601B from 1995. As you would expect, it has major problems reading CD-R disks. Audio CDs and CD-ROMs are OK. The only CD-R media that I have successfully got to work with it is Traxdata 40x CD-R 90 High Capacity (burned at 16x speed on a BD-RE drive.) Everything else fails. I have no idea why these particular disks work but others don't.

ETA: Here the thread I started about this: [SOLVED] Old CD-ROM drives and CD-Rs

shamino wrote on 2020-09-15, 05:11:

Not sure if the 650MB discs will ever be needed but I wanted to have them around as an option.

If you ever need to burn anything to an optical-disc based game console, maybe they could be in handy then: I suspect compatibility may be hit or miss with some earlier readers like the Mega-CD perhaps (given I want to buy one of those, might be handy to know about this topic more 🤣)

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-09-15, 16:00:

wiretap wrote on 2020-09-15, 15:53:

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-09-15, 13:55:

CMC is a garbage company. I'd be shocked if their "Taiyos" were as good

They have excellent optical media. Using early CD-burners (1x, 2x, 4x), they were the only discs I could use that wouldn't fail a burn when performing a validation. I've also had zero issues with compabitility of burned media on old single/dual/quad speed IDE and SCSI CD-ROMs in my old systems.

REAL Taiyo Yuden discs are indeed excellent. Taiyo Yuden the company no longer exists, they sold the brand name to CMC. Again, I'd be shocked if CMC can maintain the manufacturing process to the same standard

My understanding is that Taiyo Yuden did more than sell their name. I read that CMC actually bought Taiyo's tooling, shipped it to Taiwan, and set up a Taiyo media line which operates under at least some kind of a quality/name licensing agreement with Taiyo. CMC also now makes Verbatim's Data Life Plus AZO discs under a similar licensing agreement with Mitsubishi. I don't know if there's been any changes, but its still classic cyanine and marketed as a direct replacement for the Taiyo-JVC Japanese media.

FWIW, Taiyo is still in business and just exited the optical media business. Pretty much everyone has, and CMC is about the last vendor standing. We should be glad these discs are even still available at all given the current popularity of optical media.

I like to use my old CD-ROM drives as well and tried various different media, burners and burn-speeds. A while ago I've bought a Pioneer DVR-108BK burner which I use to burn at 4x speed. I can burn CD's that are readable in my Philips CDI and Philips CDD462 (a single speed drive, 1992 technology) without problems. I've selected media for it's quality (i.e. Taiyo Yuden) but it's not a guarantee that they will be the most easiest in terms of readability. In fact; I've burned a bunch of budget Platinum CD's and they turned out to be better readable than various older Taiyo Yuden based CD-R's. I've tried the same media with my 2x Philips CDD3610 and with a newer S-ATA NEC drive (at 16x speed, which is the lowest setting possible) but without much success. The 3610 burns were readable but difficult and with the newer NEC drive at 16x none of them were reabable.

To be successful in using CD-R's with older drives: start with a good quality drive that's proper and clean. Burn at low speeds (it really does make a difference), use a good quality burner and use good yet 'easy readable' media.

shamino wrote on 2020-09-15, 16:51:

I'm not sure if Memorex ever made CDRs, they just pay somebody to print their name on stuff. 😀

Ok, DVDInfoPro Elite program saying they are from three different manufacturers:

Ritek
Moser Baer India
CMC Magnetics Corporation

Iv bought verious 10/20 packs of those generic Verbatim 700MB CD-Rs and haven't noticed any issues installing operating systems or music tracks skipping with them.

Not for PCs with 16x and over drives anyway. The one time I tried with console, Dreamcast games, I got more mixed resuts.

I don't have a quality burner (just a cheap LiteOn USB Drive) anyway, so I guess they're just good enough for the little use they get installing games.

Modern Verbatim floppies on the other hand, are absolute shit.

Can not find the topic but we have been over this in the past. If you can get 16X NOS CDR media and burn it (even on a new burner) you should have no problem reading it in an older 4x or 8x cdrom. When the media speeds where increased above 32x it started becoming a problem due to changes in the dye color that the old drives have an issue with. It is not a "set in stone" manufacture issue as even the cheap grade older CDR media will work in older drives when burned in a newer drives if the media is the right type.

Nice that some of you mention Taiyo Yuden as they did make great media but there is no way of knowing who made the media until you actually purchase (as TDK, Phillips, Imatation, etc) changed who they bought thru many times over the decades.

IF the package says 1x or 4x compatible then the dye color should be mostly OK for most older slow Cdroms... just my opinion after doing this since the early 90's