CD-RW.org the best known place for discussing CD-R media brands has had very few users in the CD-R(W) media forum lately so I thought it would be a good idea to start a new, more accurate thread for dead CD-R media at HA whether it's a success will depend on the users.

If you have more than one brand feel free to post them all.

Use CDR Identifier or Nero Info Tool to identify the real CD-R manufacturer also specify the CD-R manufacturer on the case, box or spindle, drive used to burn, speed, color of the CD-R & burn date would also be useful

CD-R quality can be measured using,

• Nero CD Speed (Extra\Disc quality test)
• Kprobe for Lite-on owners
• Plextools for Plextor Premium owners (Q-Check C1/C2 Test)

For those who want to know what are generally reliable brands to use here is my short summary which is based on the results found here, personal experience & these forums,

• Afterdawn - CD-RW.org forum
• CD Freaks - Club CD Freaks media forum
• CDR-Info - CD/DVD±R/RW/RAM Media forum

Highest quality brands (*)

• Taiyo Yuden
• Mitsubishi

Medium quality brands

• Ricoh
• RiTEK
• SKC
• TDK
• Fornet
• Prodisc
• Mitsui Toatsu Chemicals
• Moser Baer India
• Multi Media Masters & Machinery
• MPO
• Kodak (!)

Low quality brands

• Sony
• Princo
• Gigastorage
• Plasmon
• CMC Magnetics
• AMS Technologies
• Lead Data Inc
• NAN-YA Electronics

(*) Gold will help prevent deterioration, look for gold CD-R's

(!) Tops are reported to peel with time

This list may change depending on future findings


DVD-R Armour is a solution for those who find DVD media too delicate (scratches easily), newer DVD-R Armour discs also provide extra UV protection.

The OSTA.org (Optical Storage Technology Association) site has some very useful information & can answer many of your CD-R questions.

I have ~2 year old Memorex (CMC) discs that have unrecoverable C2 errors around the end of the disc.

I once did a --rather limited-- experiment, just for fun.
I recorded a CMC CD-R with music with my LiteOn 24102B.
I left if outdoors, recorded-side up and everyday I would try to extract/play it.
It worked for 17 days, no sh*t

Maybe it was just luck, but I have stopped worrying about CD-Rs becoming useless.
I have been burning since 1998 and even the earliest CDs I have (except for some very-bad-I-don't-know-who-made-'em-old-super-green-cyanine-on-gold's) still work.
So I have survived without problems what we could call "Pio2001's curse"

/me is uploading some Plextools Pro scans now ...

El-Cheapo deep-blue AZO CD-R disc (650 MB), dated 19. January 2000

Burned with Yamaha CRW-6416S

ID: Multi Media Masters & Machinery, sold under the brand of "Network"
ATIP: 97m 28s 21f



Tasty scan IMHO ...

Another scan of a disc with the same ATIP/ID, but sold by Traxdata (Traxdata Silver), burned with the CRW-6416S as well ...



More scans to follow ...

Hehe ...

Lead Data - AZO

97m26s50f - burned 10.10.1998 on a TEAC SCSI 4X CDR writer



Plextools refused to scan the whole disc ... and look at the scale ...

Fujfilm, but those ones were quite old (about 7 years old)

Taiyo Yuden!

I won't buy Princo ever again, they are all dying. Burnt with Yamaha 4260 some years ago.

GIGA-master. Burnt five of them. Not one of them works now!

years ago i burned a lot of PLATINUM CD-Rs. today all of them are either partially or completely unreadable. when i try to look up the manufacturer info with the nero tools, all fields are blank, so i can't say who made this pieces of shit.

-andy-

i have some CD's that are so crappy that they don't even have any ATIP information or if they do it's unreadable! The brand on the box is JTec
edit: they don't even have one scratch and were stored safely!

nan-ya
the caoting peeled off

I've been using CD-R's for about five years now - have discs by HP, Kodak and Sony. None have failed so far.

I've however seen an Amkette disk which belonged to one of my friends fail... it had no scratches on it's surface.

Fujifilm CD-R's are (or were) also manufactured by Ritek, TDK, and last but not least, FUJI Photo Film Co., Ltd.

Oh, I see... I thought they were all manufactured by TY.

FujiFilm discs labeled MADE IN JAPAN are manufactured by Taiyo Yuden; if they are labeled MADE IN TAIWAN the manufacturer varies. But I've never had a FujiFilm or Taiyo Yuden disc fail.

The only "brand names" that have consistently died - from my own experience - are Memorex and Maxell. Both are reputedly much, much more reliable now... but they left such a bad impression that I am loathe to use/accept either of those brands for any reason, whatsoever.

- M.

I've lost tons of early Ritek and CMC discs (labeled Bestmedia, Platinum, early Tevion in Germany).

Not a single TY or MCC failed on me, though - I still got those wonderful and good-looking deep-blue Verbatim Metal AZO's (up to 12x) in my Audio CD collection ... they play fine and, apart from few scratches, no C2 errors are reported when they are scanned with either Plextools and/or K-Probe.

i don't think taiyo yuden were making fujifilm media at the time (i could be wrong, though). i have fuji media from around the same time and they are made by either fuji or TDK and both are made in japan. i have some sony taiyo yuden from like 6 years ago which don't have c2 errors. thus far i have ran into one defective fujifilm cd-r. it had small "holes" in the dye and if you hold the disc up you can see right through them.

as with other media, i've had mixed results with maxell. i have old maxells that are now almost totally unreadable and have a high c2 error rate, and i also have more recent maxell media which have no c2 errors.

IIRC, Fujifilm had made their own CD-Rs. (cyanine, green colored)

Anyway, I lost 2 Mr. Data(CMC) discs.

the TDK fujifilm are slightly more blue-ish. the fuji-made fujifilm is dark green while the TY ones are brighter green. fujifilm still make their own media today me thinks, but it's mainly distributed in europe. my local supermarket sells only TY fujifilm but my university bookshop sell made in germany fujifilm that are made by fuji.

My dead Fujifilm cds are dark green made by Matsushita.

9 Dead CMCs [sold as Memorex].

1 dead pioner CD..it got fluid inside..wierd




damn i just bougth a bunch of Memorex

-- edit --


anybody know about these BAS/EMTEC CD-R's ?

ATIP: 97m 17s 06f
Disc Manufacturer: Moser Baer India Ltd.
Reflective layer: Dye (Short strategy; e.g. Phthalocyanine)
Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown
nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f / LBA: 359849)

-- edit --

just wnated to add more info on my dead pioner cd-r

ATIP: 97m 27s 31f
Disc Manufacturer: Pioneer Video Corp.
Reflective layer: Dye (Long strategy; e.g. Cyanine, Azo etc.)
Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown
nominal Capacity: 657.42MB (74m 50s 01f / LBA: 336601)

the reflective layer (greenis color) turned to fluid on a 0.5x1cm area.
if i touch the etiket side i coudl se from below the grenn fluid making movements.

the cd-r are a backup of my win98se Danish so its a couple of years old

Hi,

I lost some cheap Memorx and Prostore (Multi Media Masters & Machinary SA) CDs. But the oldest Disk in my Collection is still alive, and in good shape. :-)

Verbatim Datalive Plus burned 1995 on Philips CDD 2000



Ciao ZYron

I have lots of "Benq", their Atip shows:

ATIP: 97m 25s 29f
Disc Manufacturer: Hitachi Maxell, Ltd.
Reflective layer: Dye (Short strategy; e.g. Phthalocyanine)
Media type: CD-Recordable
Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown
nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f / LBA: 359849)

Anyone had any experiece with these?

I've just bought a Lite-On drive for CD scanning, so here we go
I can't post any ATIP because my drive can't read ATIPs from burned CDRs.
Click on the names in order to see the K-Probe scans. Beware of their logarithmic scaling.

Burned with a Teac 4x SCSI burner, from 1 to 4x in 1999

Dead :
Maxell CDR74XL, dark blue. Scan aborted because of a read error.
Mitsui SG 74, made by Mitsui, silver.

Alive :
BASF / EMTEC 74 Extra, dark blue, burned in february 1999, the C2 errors are caused by the TAO burning.
Fnac Gold 74 Dark green, certified for 4x speed. The C2 errors are caused by TAO burning.
Kodak Digital Science InfoGuard 74 , certified for 6x speed, light bottom on gold layer. C2 errors caused by TAO burning.
TDK CDR74 Reflex, dark blue. C2 errors cause by TAO burning.
Verbatim DatalifePlus 74 Very dark blue. C2 errors caused by TAO burning.


Burned with a Yamaha 6416S burner at 6x.

1999

Dead
Mitsui Golden Dye 74, certified for 6x speed. Same as the above, but for consumers (the Mitsui SG line was for professionals). All of them (about 20 CDRs) are dead.
Interesting picture, up my first Mitsui Golden Dye, down, my last one.



A scan of the upper one, when the picture was taken, in april 2003, and a scan of the lower one.

2000

Dead
Fnac silver 74, pearlized top, light bottom, certified for 12x speed.
HiSpace silver 700MB, dark blue, certified for 12x speed. CD unreadable, scan impossible.
HiSpace Gold 700 Very dark green, certified for 6x speed.
Memorex CDR650 Certified for 8x speed, green.
Ricoh Type 74 Made in EU, light bottom. Scan aborted because of a read error.


Alive
Fnac gold 74 Light bottom, pearlized top, certified for 12x speed. The C2 burst is caused by the Lite-On spin up.

Note that the Fnac gold/silver and HiSpace gold/silver were the exact same models :





2001

Dead
HiSpace Carbon CD 80. Black bottom.

CDRs burned in 2002 are mostly alive. They are HiSpace Gold and Fnac Gold (both made by MPO), but it's too early to get an idea. Look for example at this other HiSpace Carbon CD 80 limited edition burned in late 2001, compared to the above one.
EDIT : none of the previous Fnac or HiSpace were made by MPO according to the ATIP. But HiSpace were always made by MPO according to the sleeve.

Hmm ... a DVD drive ... over at CDFreaks, they recommend using a Litey CDRW or DVD+/-RW for CD scanning ... but dead media is dead media anyway so the actual error relations should be roughly the same.

Another Disc ... C2 spikes at the end from TAO recording ...

ATIP 97m26s11f - Manufacturer ist Postech, sold under the brand of Bestmedia, unknown burner, dated 1999



High BLER at the end, but still readable ... maybe it's time to back it up *g*

Another Verbatim Metal AZO from 2000, recorded in my CRW6416S @ 6x, DAO audio CD

ATIP 97m34s20f
Mitsubishi



Damn, I wish I had bought more of these ... they harmonized perfectly with my burner ...

This CD is a Memorex burned around 1.5 - 2 years ago. 48x certified, white top - this CD played for a long time, and the CD is not scratched, but other factors might have come into play. These include:

1. Crappy 32x TDK burner: this burner never made great copies, although the CD was readable when it was first burnt.

2. CD spent much time in my car, during both the summer and winter - I have many other CDs that have survived the same treatment w/ no ill effects.

3. The CD has a label covering the entire top of the disk: If anything, I feel this would protect the data on the disc.

tevion (from a weell known discount shop here)
i'm only using TDK now.

2 Verbatim CD-RW Blue, bought in Jan 2001. Can't read them at all.
2 Philips CD-R Metal, bought in summer of 2002. 4% of unrecoverable errors at the end of the disc.

Pio2001, I would hate to breathe the air wherever you live. You've been very passionate about this subject the past year or so, and it's amazing to me to see and read about how many discs you have reported that have gone bad and are even showing erosion. I'm wondering what's causing that? Could it be altitude, air pollution, etc....whatever, it seems very abnormal to see such a high failure rate in your media.

I have probably over 1000 CD-R's from various manufacturers, and to this day every single one of them still works (as far as I know - I don't check them every day, but random scans reveal no damage). I have never seen any kind of erosion in my discs, and over the years as I've changed drives, all my drives have been able to read my burns with no problems.

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to vote in this poll.

Altitude low (between 100 and 200 meters), pollution rather high. I posted the SO2 measurments in another thread, that were found to be average by another people having the same SO2 concentration, and no dead CDRs, but I lived in a rather polluted street. Now I've moved in another part of the town.

But on the good side, I was surprised to see that some of my oldest CDRs have survived very well (see TDK and Verbatim from 1999 above), while I thought they were all dead. The Kodak surprised me too, because some died, but I threw them away long ago.

I suffered a lot of problems because I used a lot of Mitsui, and this brand especially failed me. As well as Ricoh, Fnac and HiSpace (but it is possible that Fnac were just rebranded HiSpace CDRs). Maybe I would have been luckier with TDK or Verbatim, not to mention Tayo Yuden, for which we have no trusted source here.
I think that heat played a role too. The same CDRs stored in a cooler place lasted nearly one more year than mine (but light exposure can have been a factor too). the temperature was roughly 19-22 °C from september to may, and 26-30 °C from june to august (36 °C for three weeks this summer, but the CD were already dead before).

A little off topic. I live in New England, and as we know, it has been abnormally cold here this winter. I, until yesterday, had my cdr's in storage. This was someplace that had no heat. Temps have regulary gotten below 0 degrees F. Should I worry about any damage to previously burned cdr's or blanks? When I got them out of storage, I gradually reintroduced them to the warmth. From an outside temp of 17F to a garage that was about 35F, then to a unheated halway (probably about 50F) then finally into room temp.

Hmm ... since we've been using the same burner model for quite a while, I think you should also regard the possibility of non-matching write strategies or non-properly functioning OPC's with the Yamaha CRW6416S as an additional reason for media failure ...

Nearly every piece of media that failed in my collection consists of some sort of Phatlocyanine dye (there is a multitude of crystal-clear dyes based on Phtalocyanine, not only one) ... in comparison, the Azo or Cyanine types only seldomly failed - even the el-cheapo ones from e.g. Memorex.

In addition, Yamaha hasn't been that generous with new firmware revisions (which I mostly regard as fine-tuning for media compatibility) when being compared with other manufacturers ... maybe they gave up firmware research on the low-speed 6x CDRW early in favour of the faster drives ...

But in this case, how do you explain the Ricoh scan ? the C2 rate goes up to 6000 per second, which was not the case when it was burned, while the C1 rate is still zero in very large aeras (no C1 error in more than 10 minutes).

The Fnac gold scan from 2000 shows that it does not come from a mechanical defect of the burner that would give high error rates past 62 minutes. We would have seen a C1 increase near the end.
I think that there is definitely something attacking the CD from the outer edge, and, in a lesser extend, from the inner edge.

I sometimes experienced the same phenomenon, too ... and if these C2 errors haven't been there before (how could they ...), you surely are right about the process of media degradation (although I still believe that K-Probe does not work that accurate with a DVD-ROM). Some scans of mine show higher error rates at the start (no visible damage to the CD itself) so I can also confirm that some CD's are beginning to degrade from the inner edge ...

A well-manufactured piece of media should show a somewhat consistant (and low) error rate throughout the whole disc after writing (like my Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden scans show) and a non-matching or non-properly aligned write strategy should have a constant impact on error rates.

But what about tracking/focusing errors rising to the end? Nearly every piece of media (even highest quality E-Grade TY) shows higher deviations of FE/TE with Plextools Pro towards the end - a writer not being capable of following the track properly (or a writer not using a running OPC like modern drives do to adjust write speed and fine-tune laser power output) will surely induce a higher BLER towards the end - not even regarding the heat-up of the media during the burn process which (in my case) was some "problem" with the CRW6416S.

This leads to an increase of errors towards the outer edge of the CD and, in conjunction with media degradation (which is measureable and definitely takes place) will cause media failure.

The real problem is that we cannot know how the CD error rate relations (start/end - BLER) were right from the beginning (after the burn) since no comparable tests have been conducted (and no tools for the masses - except for early versions of Nero CD Speed - have been available) back then.

What makes me somewhat doubt that this is media-related only is the fact that I regularly bought CD's with a friend - we bought the same media (I grabbed two ten-packs, he grabbed two). My CD's all failed (using a highly acclaimed quality SCSI write device) whereas my friend can still read every single CD (he did use some questionable Mitsumi ATAPI 4x writer).

IMO, the Yamaha CRW6416S was far from being crap, but support was not that strong from Yamaha's side - I would have e.g. wished some guidance in what media to buy.

In my opinion, the problems with older media that we face today are surely not entirely related to media degradation - high error rates after the burn on lower-quality media due to somewhat unlucky combinations of burner/media might introduce or accelerate the media degradation we encounter, disregarding the fact that we have been surely sold some media with badly-sealed edges (so any corrosive agent can diffuse into the CD between the reflective layer and the dye).

But MPO as a european quality manufacturer with lots of ISO 900x certificates shouldn't have produced such bad kind of media IMO ...

I'm glad that it is much harder to sell crap these days ... be it media or hardware ... thanks to communities like HA or CDFreaks, people can get well-informed before they actually buy.

Good post, Jean-Luc !

Media Manf. : Multi Media Masters & Marhinary SA
Recording Layer: Cyanine Material

CD-R labeled as:
NATURAL CD-R 700mb/80min Multispeed 48x
Aqua blue label.

REAL CRAP, I can perfectly burn (burner detects 24x max but burns at 16x max, internal protection I guess) but cannot read from these CDs, or I can read with like alot of problems using my best reader, others wont even read it.

Packed as a 50 cdr pack, for 20 Canadian dollars.

Picture if required.

Mat

Guys, I'm down ... I recently (maybe 6-9 months ago) burned some audio discs (all pop compilations with 76-80 minutes playing time) to TDK Speed-X 48x media (manufactured by TDK and still available) ...

TDK is believed to be a HQ manufacturer but look at these K-Probe scans ...

This one is totally messed up ...



This one is still readable ...



This one can only be read in the Plex Premium with C2 and "use C2" enabled in EAC 0.9B4 (no accurate rip possible, though the rip sounds fine to me)



This one can be read by the Premium in EAC (but without C2 at all) ...



All burns were carried out with a LiteOn LTR-52246S @ 16x CLV ... it seems that TDK has some serious problems at the end of these discs ... all of them (except no.2) are unreadable in plextools as well (they are read, but not without remaining CU errors being reported) ...

I'm baffled ...

Can anybody test Verbatim Pastel made by Taiyo Yuden just the green one? Better 32x. There were rumours that greens have high C1 level. My drive can't check C1 errors :-(.

By the way. Can anybody explain me who paints CD-Rs if brand and manufacturer are not the same? Mitsubishi or Taiyo Yuden?

Since 1999 only two Platinum (I have just a few of them and all have the same problem) audio discs are rotting from the outer side and as they were recorded up to full capacity they show a lot of C2-errors. Still readable, though.

The golden Kodaks work just fine, no C2-errors. Most of them isn't marked, I just wrote the last four digits from the center on the paper inner sleeve for identification.

The rest is "too young to die" yet. But I use only good brands, i.e. Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden etc. I bought also 20 pcs of Dysan Audio CD-Rs and they sound great, just don't know, how long they last. As I have lossless backup of every piece of music, I just don't care...

I adopted this solution too, after many problems with CD-R reliability. I make lossless copies on my hard drive and use an internet online backup service to make offsite backup of these copies in case my hard drive would crash (or my house burglared ...).

How much would it cost to back up ~250Gb of data on the internet. Not a practical solution for me I think.

I have 400 CD-Rs and only died 3 since 1995, the 3 are Samsung 4X, from 1998, only 1 is still alive (I copy itt already). The recordable surface is green color. Sorry but I can't remember what is the manufacturer.

250 Gb : yups!
I only have 30 Gig online : it costs me 3 euros per month (and i paid ~150 eur for the initial transfer).
If i had 250 Gig i think i would make a severe selection of the most valuable part to put on internet !

hmm... what all programs can u use to test cdr's like that?

i have a few older maxell's that might be gettin' close to dying and i wanna run some tests to see if i need to back them up to dvdr now to be able to save the data

jeanLuc

I think you have a dodgy cdr writter. I will check some old cdr media tonight (3 years old) and I bet you I have hardly any c1 errors.

The only CD-R's I've ever had die were in 1997-98. I had a Philips 2X burner, and I used those $15 HP SureStore gold discs for stuff I cared about. The gold media would shatter and flake off of the clear plastic if you dropped them on their edge, so they weren't that good, either. Maxell was making awful CD-R's that were an extremely transparent green with a funny organic look to it. I had several of them die within a couple days.

I bought nothing but Verbatim DLP's for a very long time, but these days I'll use anything that isn't completely generic and I haven't had anything die on me.

DVD-R quality seems to have started off about as bad as CD-R's. I can't believe how much complete crap is being sold. I've had great luck with Ritek G04's, but everything else besides TDK/Verbatim seems to be worthless.