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.