19 Apr
2005
19 Apr
'05
12:04 a.m.
Billy wrote:
For magnetic media, they are superb. Probably has to do with the fact
that they make it themselves, rather than just letting bean counters
buy the cheapest crap they can find and slap a TDK label on, as they
apparently do for CD-R.
Again, the factories and media I'm talking about
are mainland China.
They don't make it to the US because among other reasons, they don't pay
the license fees. The Optical Storage forums watch very closely. As
soon as they spot one, they head straight to Customs and plug it.
Yes, I'm sure that's every bit as effective as the ban on Chinese
gel candy, which was still on store shelves all over the country.
Customs will find a contraband shipment every once in a while, make
a big noise about how wonderfully effective they are, and meanwhile
99 other shipments slide right through.
Lots of cooperation these days from Customs given the
current political
situation.
Sure, enforcing import control for trademark violations on optical media
is near the top of the governments priority list for preventing
terrrorism. Right. And I've got some nice oceanfront property in
Colorado to sell you, too.
I'm not certain what brand names you are talking
about. Two that are
showing up in Silicon Valley but aren't very good are GQ and
kHypermedia. Are these who you mean?
No, the ones I'm talking about usually don't have any brand name on them
at all, and the labels are either in Chinese, really broken English, or
a mix of the two.
I haven't tried GQ CD-R media. Some people say it's good, others
say it's bad. I expect that they probably change OEM suppliers at
the drop of a hat.
Oddly enough the GQ 8X DVD+R media seems to work better in my Pioneer
DVR-108 than most of the name brands.
I'm especially surprised that you had burn
problems
with the Yamaha drive. They are by far the most roboust unit of those
you tested.
Yes, the Yamaha was the best for any media that was halfway reasonable.
Some media is just plain bad, and then it doesn't matter how good the
drive is.
Also, the fact
that TDK has at times in the past shipped CMC Magnetics
media under the TDK brand does tell me something very important about
the TDK brand. Even though TDK might not be shipping CMC Magnetics
media today, there's no way in hell I'll ever buy writable optical media
from TDK again. Not because it's crap today; since I haven't tried it
recently I don't know. But instead, because it is proof positive that
TDK does not perform adequate qualification of their suppliers. Thus
there is no way to buy TDK optical media and have any reasonable
expectation that it is not crap.
This is where I cannot agree with you. At Quantum, I had an opportunity
to visit TDK head and magnetic media factories in Japan and China. I
also took customers with me and they went through the Quality processes
of TDK with a fine tooth comb. TDK has a world class quality
organization. Later I tested their optical drives and media. Their
quality is some of
the best in the field. I just looked at the numbers on my DVD Recorder.
In the last 18 months, I've used 1200+ DVD+R disks. About 250 of
those were TDK. I had 2 bad burns, both just before I lost an OPU. The
only other media that I've better luck with is Sony (who doesn't make
their own anyway).
Could be. I was only talking about CD-R. I bought five spindles after
after they switched from Taiyo-Yuden to CMC Magnetics, and the failure
rate on all my burners was >66% (vs. 0% for Taiyo-Yuden). TDK didn't
want to refund my money because they said my burner was broken. They
didn't seem to care that one of the burners it didn't work in had their
own name on it, or that all my burners had no trouble with other brands
of discs.
Look, I'm not trying to change your opinion.
No, but I'm trying to prevent other people from going though what
I did.
By the way I'm curious, what software did you use
for this testing -
Roxio, Mediostream, Nero, Neo, Pinnacle, Sonic? This is one area where
you can get widely divergent results from the same batch of media.
cdrecord under Linux, and when that had problems, whatever Windows crap
(crippleware Roxio, I think) that was bundled with the TDK burner. Same
results with both programs, on all eight of my burners. I don't see how
different software can make a difference for recording a single data
session in track-at-once mode with no buffer underruns. The software
tells the drive, "burn this data", sends 650MB of data to it, then says
"finalize the session". Not much to go wrong in there. It's not like
there are mysterious magic numbers that have to be sent in the ATAPI
commands such that one program is going to have better magic numbers
than another. It's all documented in the MMC and SFF specs.
Back before those specs were widely available, I had to reverse-engineer
the necessary commands from an analyzer trace of a Windows program burning
a disc in order to make cdwrite on Linux support the first HP burner.
So I do have half a clue about the command sets.
Anyhow, if you wanted to do something more complicated, I could imagine
that some programs might be prone to screwing it up, but recording a
single data session in Mode 1 is about as trivial as you can get.
Eric