probably in phasing out stage,
just like the decline of new floppy-disk's quality when its almost declared to be obsolete,
if being compared to the quality when floppy being prime removeable media.

Blank CD media has pretty much disappeared in my area, but cheapo 50 and 100 disc spindles of DVD+Rs from Maxell and a couple other manufacturers still seem to be easy enough to find. Haven't really noticed if the quality has declined since this stuff first became common as I pretty much stopped using optical media years ago except for burning the occasional movie or burning an OS install for my retro rigs.

I think a lot of this market driven. Most people don't have any concept of paying more for better disks - they want to get 50 disks for $20. The Maxell high-grade DVD disks were among some of the best ever made - but they were expensive. Now Maxell disks are outsourced. Sony disks used to be made by Taiyo Yuden and they were very good - now they are junk.

I haven't been happy with blank CDs since the early 2000s. I only use them temporarily when I work on a computer without USB ports and/or network access and that's been a long time. Even OS installs I do over network nowadays.

I still have no problems with Taiyo Yuden (for cd), or Verbatim for DVD+/-R. I think it's the burners and burner software which has gone to hell myself. I still have my plextor/yamaha drives and they burn stuff fine with Nero 6.6.1.15D.

Personally, I've never run into burning problems with writable CD or DVD media, but then because I don't burn a lot of stuff and I do so primarily as a means of backup, I always burn at slow speeds to ensure the highest quality burn possible. Besides which, my DVD-RW drive has issues burning at its top speed. I think it's been defective like that ever since the computer was brand new, but since I got this thing off Dad years later, and he never burned anything, he would never have noticed. I've never had any problems burning at minimum speed on this thing (16x for CD, 4x for DVD). Yeah it takes longer, but oh well, I just go play console games while it does its thing. :P

I don't burn much either. However I do have a lot of CDRWs because half the time I quickly need a Boot CD or test if I can get a game from GOG.com running on my Time machine and things like that. For storage I just use HDDs. I have one of these USB dockers hooked up to my desktop. Slide in a 2GB drive and it does my backups. I set up all my Windows 7 libraries so that everything I work on gets backed up easily.

In a way storage capacity with discs has been really lagging. BR does offer 25GB or 50GB, but the discs simply cost too much.

I am just now starting to wake up to the idea of using external drives for data storage. I like the "permanence" of CD/DVD media....but then by today's standards 4.7 gigabytes it not very much anymore.

I think all the media has gone downhill. Sony disks used to be made by Daxon.. they are gone. Some of the Prodisc Verbatims were pretty good.... now they are made by CMC magnetics and nowhere near as good as they used to be. I just got some Taiyo Yuden TYG03 disks...they are NOT as good as the old 8x stuff.

I guess when you get down to it. what really is permanent?

After the floods in Thailand prices are now coming back down again. HDD manufacturers have been making a killing and it took quite some time for prices to come down, despite there never being a real shortage as far as I could see here in the shops.

I ONLY use Taiyo Yuden media... never have failed me... they're not easy to get though... they are branded JVC in the western world if you can find it
for DVD+R DLs, Verbatim Azo blues are the only way to go

How exactly do you decide if a disc is "good" ? Do you mean you've had discs that you couldn't finish burning, or something?

ncmark wrote:

I like the "permanence" of CD/DVD media....but then by today's standards 4.7 gigabytes it not very much anymore.

I'm sort of tempted to switch to Blu-Rays.

get a liteon drive then use nero discspeed to do a quality scan on the disc

bad burns could also be caused by a crap drive... there's always only a few that are good

Taiyo Yuden can also be found here as Plextor, not just JVC.

I do a few burns now and then, whenever I need to buy more I look where it was made primarly, and then the brand. The trick is findinf Made in Japan or Made (wich I think Taiyo Yuden is exclusive)or Made in (somewhere in europe like germany or netherlands) works great all the time, for Sony/NEC and Samsung/Toshiba drives, also for LG drives.

Also, one can have a 100% sucess rate with a particular media on a particular drive, and that same media just behave badly on other drive, that for coincidence burns happily other brand of media that does not achieve good results on the first drive. I even had one Samsung drive that did not liked Samsung discs, 🤣. But maybe because they were manufactured in the south asian pacific?

Finally, some media does not like slower speeds, seem to be made especifically to higher speeds (wich is stupid, but more cost effective.). I seem to recall some discs having the speed range for burning.

USB flash drives are great for backups. Depends on how much storage you need, but they keep getting cheaper and higher capacity - even 64GB ones are very affordable these days. With HDDs, I tend to find that the newest, largest capacities mean more reliability issues (those issues somehow tend to go away when even newer and bigger HDDs are introduced... and so on).

Always had problems with blank CDs/DVDs - after all, none of the optical disc formats were really designed for a primary purpose of being writeable with home equipment, and the quality of both media and burners was always kind of a compromise. I've never had a CD-R that didn't go flaky on me after a few years, whether used for audio or data, no matter the brand.

The other side of the issue is that the CD/DVD writers themselves are probably anything but uncompromising in quality.

The most unnerving experience I've had is trying to work with dual layer DVDR discs. There was a time when there was really only one brand that even worked. I don't know if that's changed.

True. Another issue is that most people have a DVD writer as their only optical drive, and a lot of those are actually pretty crappy at reading media, especially CD-Rs (which are still around). Your modern DVD writer may choke on that precious backup/install disc, but there's a fair chance that a plain old CD-ROM drive would read it just fine - a friend who worked at a computer lab until recently used to keep one around just for that.

I also use Nero CD/DVD speed to scan disks. I know some people question the validity of such scans, but it is better than nothing. I once got some Verbatim DVD-R disks that scanned with an absurdly high number of errors, something like 200,000,000. Sure enough, they became unreadable in 12-18 months.

I have seriously considered going back to CD-R for one set of backups. I think they were more robust than DVD.

cdrinfo.com has just about everything you'd ever want to know about drives, what burns speed to use with which drive and what media. Comprehensive testing for audio, data, speed, c1/c2 errors, error handing, etc etc etc.

I know memorex has a bad reputation. In the past, I bought some that turned out to be Ritek, and it was pretty good. I bought some this morning, and it turned out to be CMC. This is the worst garbage I have ever seen. I tried burning on a CD and DVD drive, no difference, I could not get ONE burn out of TEN tries.

I feel like taking them back.... this is just ridiculous