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Best CD-Rs?

A

Auggie

Golden Member
A quick search for CDRs and CD-Rs didn't return much, so I thought I'd ask about brands of CD-Rs.

Some people are fanatical about which ones r0ck and which ones suck. I've never had a problem per se with any brand (I've had Imation, Memorex and some other generic brand) and all have worked fine. Today I bought a 100-pack from OfficeCrax (free after rebate - you know...) which was Memorex (made in Taiwan). I understand that different brands use different manufactures - like Ritek discs are bought and distrubuted by several companies, including but not limited to Imation and Memorex, right?

So, which brands (manufacturer or distributer) are the "best" and which one's are "crappy?" And what makes them crappy - do they just fail the burn process or do they wear out easier? Furthermore, how do you know (before buying) which is which, since the package I bought had no distinguishable marking on the outside (I only found "Made in Taiwan" on the discs themselves after opening up the packaging).

Edited for spelling mistakes!
 
a lot of people are crazy about Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs... i'm not sure why... they seem to turn out pretty well for me tho... they are quickly becoming hard to find nowadays tho... usually they were sold as Fuji CD-Rs, but you'd have to check the packaging to make sure they were made in Japan, cuz the ones made in Taiwan are not TY's...
 
Honestly as long as you treat it like a normal cd (no direct sunlight, avoid scratches, don't run over it with a chair, etc.), any CD-R including the really cheap ones will probably last a long time.

Loose translation: The best CD-R is whichever is on sale in spindles of 50 or 100 for $10 or less that week.
 
Originally posted by: iotone
a lot of people are crazy about Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs... i'm not sure why... they seem to turn out pretty well for me tho... they are quickly becoming hard to find nowadays tho... usually they were sold as Fuji CD-Rs, but you'd have to check the packaging to make sure they were made in Japan, cuz the ones made in Taiwan are not TY's...
Click to expand...

Yeah, what he said🙂
 
Taiyo Yuden (Made in Japan), for me it's usually the Fuji brand.

I usually pay $5 for 50 800MB/70mn CD-R's for Best Buy or CompUSA after rebate.
 
I've been using Memorex for a while now, haven't given me any problems. So long as it's a name brand it's probably fine.
 
For data that I would prefer to not lose, I like the Taiyo Yudens, they're very compatible with LiteOn CDR drives. The Fuji branded TY's are good, they have durable coatings. Besides the obvious problem with a cheap coating allowing the metalization to flake away, I had a couple of old non-Fuji discs that got stored with a greasy thumbprint on the top coating which somehow penetrated into the dye layer over time and destroyed the data there -- I think the quality of the coating is very important. Name brand discs are more likely to have quality coatings. The failures I've had seem more attributable to the coating than anything else.

For reliability, I've looked and can't find any true tests and results. None of the tech sites will ever acquire the industrial equipment to run real reliability tests, and the manufacturers aren't going to release internal data. After reading at the major CDR forums, the best I can come up with is to buy a brand that results in a very low C1/C2 error with your particular burner. The LiteOn/Taiyo Yuden combination seems very good in that regard. Cheaper discs often equate to more C1/C2 errors (not always though). The higher the amount of initial errors, the more likely that you will lose data eventually. Japanese manufactured discs are generally regarded as higher quality than Taiwanese discs.

To add to all that, you can have bad batches of discs that result in massive C1/C2 error. I've run into bad batches of Fuji Taiyo Yuden media, the whole spindle. If reliability is a concern, you should probably check at least a few random discs from every spindle, regardless of brand.
 
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