Tommaso wrote:Some older drives cannot read burned media, only pressed, but on the other hand I have had some 4x cd roms have no problems with any disks. Does anyone know if there are specific brands of CD ROMs and DVD ROMs that are better quality than others, and are older drives built better than newer ones. I know this is the case with VCRs. The old ones are built like tanks and last forever if taken care of and the newer ones are light as a feather and you are lucky if they last a year. Just curious.
Tommaso
Newer DVD drives eventually got to be so cheap that I have a hard time believing they could possibly be built as well, but I don't really know. As far as burners are concerned, one real problem with older burners is that they don't have firmware updates for more recent blank discs. Whenever a blank disc is inserted, the drive checks the MID code and finds a burning strategy in it's firmware for those particular discs. If it doesn't have a strategy for those discs then it uses a generic one, which works but results in a lower quality burn.
My main PC has 2 burners in it. One is my old Pioneer DVR-108, the other is a more modern (and cheap) Optiarc AD-7200S.
Both produce good burns with Taiyo Yuden 8X DVD+R discs, because that's an old series of discs so both drives have a well developed recording strategy for them. However, my cheap RiData 16X DVD+R discs give lousy burn quality on the old Pioneer, while they give good results on the Optiarc and another newer drive. The difference in burn quality with those is dramatic, and it's surely because the Pioneer doesn't recognize them and is using a generic burn strategy.
Over at myce.com (formerly and better known as CDFreaks), the most popular tool for scanning disc quality is Nero CD-DVD Speed. The results vary depending on the drive, so the more enthusiastic people over there have separate drives that they like to use just for scanning.