SCSI CD drive capable of reading CD-R (long)

In 1999, I went to work for Philips, managing customer support for CD burners and DVD burners. State of the art then was 2X, going to 4X. There were very few suppliers of RW media or burners; Sony had the biggest market share but exited quickly to free up capacity for the PlayStation 2. Philips had a large lab in Hasselt, Belgium. One section was to test all media in the marketplace to see that it was within spec, would work on the Philips' drives. And most importantly, that it was legal; ie paid the license fees to the patent owners - Philips, Sony, HP etc. CD-R and CD-RW fees are a huge source of income. And that little logo on the doors of drives also means that they paid the fees, another large source of revenue. This IP is agressively enforced. The test lab was fascinating. They went through thousands of disks a month. Various offices of Philips around the world would buy the media and send it in for testing and fee verification. Hong Kong, Taipei, and Seoul all sent in big boxes every month. There were many tools used to verify the p[hysical parameters and the electrical. They even had a calibrated dust machine to test door seals and dust read through. It was literally a chamber that would be filled with different particle sizes of fine dust for hours on end. I also got to visit the R&D lab in Eindhoven, where the original work on CDs took place. The still have the original CD that was the first to be read. And it can still be read. All of this leads up to some of the information being tossed out on this thread. I'll try to put down what I know. 1. There are very few high volume suppliers in the world of good tight tolerance polycarbonate disks. They have a huge investment in automated manufacturing equipment. Just like ICs makers, the start up costs prevent most companies from entering the market. 2. Thus, most CD-Rs and DVD+/-Rs come from a small number of physical plants. In 2000, you could count them on one hand. Since then, they may have doubled. 3. The major differences in media came from the dye and the process to deposit the dye. Many companies (such as Philips, HP, Memorex, TDK) have a propietory dye they have developed themselves. They contract out the manufacturing of the actual disks. As with any outsourcing, some companies may have multiple sources for the same part number. 4. Getting these processes under control takes time. The quality of parts made this year is orders of magnitude better than it was in 2000 and 2001. If you are making decisions based on media purchased a few years ago, your data points don't reflect what is out there today. This is one of the reasons for the varied experiences on the same media. The factories could be different, the processes better, the formula changed. But the brand and model number could be the same. 5. Saying a certain brand is crap, and another outstanding may be only a personal bias. For example, in the ealy days of DVD+RW disks, I visited the factory that Philips used for their brand name. In the same building, I saw production lines for the other 5 companies shipping DVD+RW at that time. In other words, it all came from the same factory! A couple of days later, I was in CompUSA and salesman lectured me on how one brand was so bad they didn't carry it any more; but Brand X really had their act together. Both brands literally came from the same line and dye process - they were under a cross licensing agreement. 6. There CAN be very real differences of user experiences. But media is not the only factor, not even the biggest factor. Just like magnetic media, these are complex systems of media, read/write channels,OPU construction, chip sets, software and firmware. 7. Lasers are an exception. There were only 2 laser sources in 2000 for CD-R devices. They used the Seagate "waterfall" priciple: the tightest spec parts went to the biggest buyer or payer of the best prices. Further down, parts with wider specs went to the next tier of OEMs. Finally at the bottom, what's left went to the companies you never heard of - they don't sell in the US marketplace for obvious reasons. The lasers go into OPUs (Optical Pick Up Units). There are again only a handful of OPU suppliers in the world. For a long time, if you bought a CD-R drive, the OPU came from one of two companies, regardless of the brand of the drive. Today 3 companies still have most of the market. 8. Another factor being ignored in this dicussion is the progress made in improving reliability. The CD recordable market went from 2X to 52X in around 3 years. Depending on how you count, that was 10 or 11 generations. Entire new chip sets and suppliers suddenly appeared, leveraging of the previous generations. New features were added. The firmware solved the over/under run problems, then the tracking at higher RPM, then the read through scratches, thermal compensation for thinner dye etc. Recently, the first SATA drives showed up. Unless you buy new drives every six months, your experience on a given drive and media can be radically different from somebody else with the same combination but newer/older than you. 9. After being involved with tens of thousands of disks burned, I have data that shows very little difference in performance from one type of media over another. There ARE some really crappy disks coming out of China - I've seen some I could read a newspaper through. Another factory ships everything pre-scratched. But with rare exceptions, these disks never reach the US or Europe. If you have personal preferences that lead you to pick one brand over another, go with it, But base your decision on the results of YOUR drive with YOUR media. If you run into a nay-sayer for a particular type, ask for his data - what drive, what media etc. The hits being given to certain suppliers or factories are probably not based on large scale testing on multiple drives. Some of these opinions don't sound like they are based on data at all. The current quality and state of the art at some of the companies being run down in this forum are excellent. It is probably 90-10 a drive or software problem rather than a media issue. Make your decisions on your data, not someone else's bias. Billy