As for discs and quality, I found this site to be a treasure trove of information:
https://club.myce.com/c/blank-media/32
(and other sub-forums there as well, for various burners)
I still use them semi regular... need about 200MB of utils transferred to a retro box? CDR.. Try to avoid using DVD-R unless capacity demands it, so I can read it in older laptops with only CD drive etc. I pretty much always do "disk at once" mode though no multisession, and 4x burn seems most infallible. I often "shovelware" the remaining capacity with a bunch of whatever is around on that system in terms of games, utils etc, in case I need it later.
Wish I knew more about why burners suddenly die though, running out of them.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
bestemor wrote on 2021-08-04, 16:49:As for discs and quality, I found this site to be a treasure trove of information:
https://club.myce.com/c/blank-media/32(and other sub-forums there as well, for various burners)
OH YES!!!!!!
I spent many hours on that site!!!!!!!
less about nostalgia and more of a necessity when dealing with older hardware and software.
My first burner was a Aopen 4x that came bundled with Nero Burning Rom 5 or 6 I can't remember which. It was IDE and I had a crappy PC Chips board with a fairly slow K6-2 CPU.
Buffer underrun issues abound. But that was my first upgrade I installed on that PC and no one else in my tiny hometown had a CD burner so I got hit up to burn mp3 discs at school a BUNCH, dial up internet and all.
Good times.
Heh, I thought I got first of mine kinda late, but it was pre MP3 player ubiquity, so I kept it quiet so I didn't get nagged into being a one man pirate CD factory.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
I got my first CD burner, a HP 9150i, almost exactly 20 years ago, in March 2001. I still have some of the freebie CD-R disks that came with it, which were the first I ever burned. They are totally unreadable nowadays of course.
However, I had good results on one of the old CD-Rs I tried data recovery on: Data recovery from optical disks
99% of the data was recovered.
Is this too much voodoo?
I am really finding myself wishing I had stocked up on DVD before the good brands disappeared.
My favorites were the Maxell high grade with hard coat - you could store them in wallets without worrying about them getting scratched up
Scratching durabililty aside... the 'best' blank DVDs must IMHO be the (non-CMC!) Taiyo Yuden/JVC 8x DVD+R. At least vs error levels (PIE/PIF).
(with longevity/storability not tested sufficently to say either or...)
When I one day just for 'fun' tested this error scanning program I randomly had found online, I discovered the 'wonderful' world of scanning.... and that not all discs NOR burners were equally made... 😆
Some rabbit hole that was though(!).
PS: you can still get the 8x DVD-R version, but the DVD+R is the real deal...
(yes, 8x actually scans better than 16x, but me no idea as to why)
(item 124806704608)
There were supposed to be differences in the +/- on CDRs, something to do with patent avoidance, and I heard that with DVD there was no difference, just a marketing thing to reach ppl that thought the plus or dash versions of CDs worked better for them. But then you get into whether then maybe only big names made the plus version, or they were ignored in the market by ppl with a clue, so they ended up discounted, so hit the "best for the money" spot.
Edit: Well I guess I'm wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_recordable Like the great Abraham Lincoln once said, "never believe everything you hear on the internet"
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
Does anyone have a drive that can use DVD-R DL (not DVD+R DL) disks? I got a cake box of these (Verbatim brand) a few years ago out of curiosity, but none of my drives can even recognize them. I also have a Panasonic VHS/DVD-combo recorder which claims to be able to use this format, but it can't, at least not these. Again, it completely fails to recognize them.
When I one day just for 'fun' tested this error scanning program I randomly had found online, I discovered the 'wonderful' world of scanning.... and that not all discs NOR burners were equally made... 😆
I used to scan all of my DVDs and Blu-rays after burning on the iHBS112 using Opti Drive Control. However, I stopped a few years ago because none of my newer BD-RE drives had this capability, and I didn't want to wear out the iHBS112.
Is this too much voodoo?
Apparently quality CD-R burners are still valued in audiophile communities. You can see some stuff like Plextor priced crazy high.
I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.
My first drive, was an Acer 4x cdrw, on a P200mmx with 32mb, I don't remenber many problems with buffer underruns. I still like to have an optical drive on all my systems, I run away fron new cases that don't have a 5 1/4 drive bay. I have very good memories of that era, when the pendrives and memory cards didn't exist. I still use then frequentlly. The best cdr discs I remenber, the Memorex black.
I only have one Plextor drive, a SCSI CD-ROM from 1998. It's a heavy, solid thing which is clearly built to last.
Is this too much voodoo?
I remember getting a parallel port CD burner for my old Toshiba laptop during my first year of university, back in 1999. It wrote CDs at a leisurely 4x on a good day, and it weighed as much as the laptop itself. But the thought of burning music I downloaded through the wicked-fast Internet connection in my dorm room made me very happy indeed.
Of course, it took the 100MHz Pentium in my laptop centuries to decompress the music, and squeezing 700MB of audio through the parallel port took another decade. I absolutely could not do anything else on the computer while it was burning. If I so much as started Microsoft Word, Clippy himself would cause the burn to fail.
Still, it beat the hell out of downloading music over dial-up at home.
94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!
It's a heavy, solid thing which is clearly built to last.
Unfortunately, laser will die just like any other.
I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.
Oldest CD-ROM drive I have is a Toshiba XM-3601B from 1995. It still works fine, but of course cannot read CD-Rs, only CD-ROM and Audio CD.
Is this too much voodoo?
My first CDR drive was a Hi-Val... 4X maybe? It probably burned about 5 good discs in it's life.
I chased bogus theories about what might be wrong, burned a lot of discs that seemed to work but actually had hidden errors, and never really came to grips with the fact that it was dead.
I should have pursued a warranty claim, but considering it was Hi-Val, maybe it was only good for 90 days or something.
Much later I noticed that the discs it was burning had regions where the laser apparently just shut off. There were rings that were burned and rings that weren't. As it aged it got worse until it became visually obvious.
I compensated next time around, buying a SCSI Plextor 12X plus interface card to go with it, basically the most expensive drive setup I could have possibly bought. It still works perfectly, but I probably overspent.
I've never experienced any problems with disc decay - anything that worked when I burned it still works now. But I lived in California that whole time until just recently, so maybe the low humidity is why. I also had good luck with old packages of blank CDRs found at thrift stores, probably the same reason.
bestemor wrote on 2021-08-05, 15:22:Scratching durabililty aside... the 'best' blank DVDs must IMHO be the (non-CMC!) Taiyo Yuden/JVC 8x DVD+R. At least vs error l […]
Scratching durabililty aside... the 'best' blank DVDs must IMHO be the (non-CMC!) Taiyo Yuden/JVC 8x DVD+R. At least vs error levels (PIE/PIF).
(with longevity/storability not tested sufficently to say either or...)When I one day just for 'fun' tested this error scanning program I randomly had found online, I discovered the 'wonderful' world of scanning.... and that not all discs NOR burners were equally made... 😆
Some rabbit hole that was though(!).
PS: you can still get the 8x DVD-R version, but the DVD+R is the real deal...
(yes, 8x actually scans better than 16x, but me no idea as to why)
JVC8x-R.jpg
(item 124806704608)
Absolutely!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anything Japanese-made is good. A lot of the Sony DVD disks were made by Taiyo Yuden. Just look for "Made in Japan" or for the octagon spacer on top!!!
As far as I am concerned optical media died when TY exited the business.
Well, I still have some hopes for blu-ray discs, with the 'Panasonic' Japan-made ones being the only ones worth spending any money on.
Sure, they cost up to 2x what the best Verbatims go for, depending on your location, but the error levels are/can be significantly lower (5x-10x !).
(I intend to use them as an extra archiving option)
Not sure about the M-discs though, how they fare in this comparison. (now THOSE are expensive, both the blu-rays and DVDs)
PS: I assume you by TY include their JVC incarnation. But for CMC, who bought the remnants and tech, now that is a totally different story.
