For anyone who has burned CD's for Music, or Data, I've found VERBATIM CD'S are the worst. The average seek time is > 7 seconds for newly burned discs. I thought I had a problem with my CD-RW Drive, so I cleaned the optical laser with a cleaning CD, then lightly cleaned it out with compressed air. I tried other brands from TDK, Maxell, Imation, CD-R's and they all work fine.
I also looked at the model of my player to make it was MULTI-READ COMPLIANT, and it is. It appears that the stamped out( bright silver surface type) CD's from the Software Companies work the best. The average seek time is less then a couple seconds. These VERBATIM CD-R's, the surface refectivity is very low, so the laser takes longer for it to read the CD. If there was a mechanical problem with my drive, it would of showed up on ALL the discs, not just Verbatim CD-R's but it doesn't. My friend had the same problem with a burned CD I gave him from the stack, and he has a Brand new SONY CD_RW/DVD Writer Drive on his system.
Avoid them like the plague! I'm thinking of dumping these CD-R's and buying some others to replace them. You might have better luck with your machine,model,make etc, but I will never buy these again!!
For those who are wondering which ones I'm refering to, on the side of the blue and white packaging, there is a reorder number# 95028
I wrote Verbatim a Email,I notified them that there could be manufacturing flaw with the CD-R's I got at christmas.
Taiyo Yuden are the best, bar none. Costs slightly more than the junk, but worth it. I buy them a 100-pack at a time.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
We back up everything (entire company library) weekly onto a few Office Depot DVDs, and they seem fine. The Brat discovered a cave under our garage at home, so we take each week's backups and original release media (floppies or CDs), pop into a ziploc, and throw into that into a big cardboard box, one for each year. I figure that if we have a server disaster, we'll figure out the mess then.
Well, it's real easy to go through CDs. Finish a project, make a copy of all files for the customer, and a copy for my archives. A big project might run 5 CDs _per_copy_. You can go through a 100 CDs pretty fast.
(I have "Mark/qrk's" project on two CDs, and that project was not at a high enough frequency (~1MHz) to make large dat files. I have some projects where the signal frequency is 8GHz.)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I don't think it's wise to use no-name media, CD or DVD, for data archival.
I have had quite an obsession with this subject for the past few years and have done mass amounts of research. About CD-Rs I can confirm Jim Thompson's assertion that Taiyo Yuden are the best. He must have done his homework.
I hesitated to use writable DVD media until just recently after backups to CD-R(W)s became cumbersome due to needing too many disks.
I settled on the use of cartridge DVD-RAM for daily backups. It's neat because I can use one cartridge to implement my two-disk scheme for dailys. I alternate between two re-writable disks each day, so there's always a record of the past two days. DVD-RAM is really cool. And having a DVD-RAM compatible drive means I can stick my DVD-RAM video recorder disks in my PC and play the files.
Then at the end of the week I burn a recordable, DVD+R in the new scheme.
Jim, you might want to process this unsettling tidbit: Taiyo Yuden DVD+R media hasn't been so perfectly reputable. If you ever move to DVDs, you'll have to do your homework all over again. I have a stack of TY 8x DVD+R lot TG001133 that have a problem with tiny specks toward the outer rim. This causes some folks to be unable to use them past 2GB.
For CD-Rs it works like this:
There are good, medium-good, and el-cheapo factories. There are only a few factories. Brands like Sony, Verbatim, etc. buy from any of the factories, and put them in the same branded boxes. So you don't know by buying Sony that you are getting the good stuff. One box of Sony may be crap factory, and the next might be the best.
It's even more bizarre with a manufacturer like TDK that makes their own, generally considered in the good category, but also brands other factories' CD-Rs into the same packages, depending on the phase of the moon.
So the only way to know if the stuff is good is to look at the manufacturer data on the disk. The brand tells you little.
So buy TY, which aren't branded but are the best.
For CD-RW, I found Yamaha 24x to be very good, but expensive.
For DVD+-R(W) things are rather new to me. I have bought a bunch of Verbatim, since I heard it was TY anyway. Unfortunately, my Linux software that tells me an abundance of technical info about CD-Rs works differently with DVD media, so I am not sure who really made these DVD+RW and DVD+R disks. (See an example below, I just get a code, no readable Manufacturer.)
crcarle@mango2:~> dvd+rw-mediainfo /dev/dvdrw INQUIRY: [MATSHITA][DVD-RAM SW-9573S][AZH3] GET [CURRENT] CONFIGURATION: Mounted Media: 1Bh, DVD+R Media ID: MCC/003 Current Write Speed: 4.0x1385=5540KB/s Write Speed #0: 4.0x1385=5540KB/s Write Speed #1: 2.4x1385=3324KB/s Speed Descriptor#0: 01/2295103 R@4.0x1385=5540KB/s W@4.0x1385=5540KB/s Speed Descriptor#1: 01/2295103 R@2.4x1385=3324KB/s W@2.4x1385=3324KB/s READ DVD STRUCTURE[#0h]: Media Book Type: A1h, DVD+R book [revision 1] Legacy lead-out at: 2295104*2KB=4700372992 READ DISC INFORMATION: Disc status: blank Number of Sessions: 1 State of Last Session: empty Number of Tracks: 1 READ TRACK INFORMATION[#1]: Track State: blank Track Start Address: 0*2KB Next Writable Address: 0*2KB Free Blocks: 2295104*2KB Track Size: 2295104*2KB
Oh but a Google on the media code reveals it's Mitsubishi.
Good day!
--
_______________________________________________________________________
Christopher R. Carlen
Principal Laser/Optical Technologist
Sandia National Laboratories CA USA
crcarleRemoveThis@BOGUSsandia.gov
NOTE, delete texts: "RemoveThis" and "BOGUS" from email address to reply.
Only after being "burned" ;-) then Mark/qrk put me straight.
Somewhere around here I have an identifier exe that he provided. I'll post it as soon as I remember where I stashed it.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I think Taiyo Yuden make a lot of electronic components.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Thank Mark/qrk for that pointer. He told me about it quite a few years ago.
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
formatting link
| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Our philosophy is massive overkill onto write-once media. Everything official is released on floppy or CD. The company librarian copies that to a server drive (proving the media is ok at that instant) and I take the originals home and put them in The Cave. Every week we burn an archive of all the server files and put them in the cave, too. Once in a while somebody else takes a set home, just for luck. Every file is copied so many times that the media could be 99% unreliable and we'd still be OK. This scheme allows for server files to be corrupted too, unlike rotating backups.
A few years ago we copied all our tape backups to CD as the drives became obsolete. Like they say, only the paranoid survive.
So far, all the CDs that we've pulled out of the cave have been fine, going back 4 years at least. We switched to DVDs about 9 months ago, and I hope they're as good. The Cave is fairly dry, and we keep them in ziploc bags; I think moisture can get to some burnable CDs and DVDs.
Tapes always were flakey. Except for paper tape, of course.
Absolutely! I learned the hard way that tape backups aren't worth the powder to blow 'em to hell... sitting for several years the tape sticks to itself :-(
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
formatting link
| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Really? you know I wouldn't go through all of this trouble letting people that these CD-R's are bad, I tried emailing them, and not only that they don't even warranty there products........Bastards!! It's more and likely I got a bad batch, but who knows.
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
My experience is the opposite. I still use several boxes of Verbatim 1.44MB disks that I bought about 14 years ago.
Now, IBM 3.5" 1,44MB disks ..... that another kettle o' fish altogether! Where I worked they were infamous for frequent failure ("sector not found"), especially when mucho time had elapsed between writing and the next attempt to read. I experienced this myself MANY times, on a variety of PCs and diskette drives. One colleague took to removing the medium (tossing the plastic shell) from each offending diskette and sticking the aforementioned "floppy" to his office door with a little magnet. When he left the company in 1992 that door was pretty much covered, a testament to crap diskettes. We all scratched our heads about why our company would continue to supply us with awful diskettes when their high failure rate was common knowledge. I think the reason was right under our noses: our company was IBM; it bought from itself.
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