OT: about cheap DVD+R DLs
Hi,
media woes are not off topic at all. :))
> I drop by local consumer electronic market and found this ANV
> 2USD-per-10-pack DVD+R DL is the only DVD DL product available,
Who is the manufacturer of "ANV" brand ?
The troublesome DVD+R DL was a Ritek (whatever is written on its label):
> > > dvd+rw-mediainfo
> > > Media ID: RITEK/S04
> I guess this ANV product is of bad quality, because
> later I found one in my office, used last year, and its data cannot be
> read now (input/output error for most files in it).
This is what i experience with DVD+R DL of various manufacturers and
with various drives. They are about the worst DVD media. Only DVD-RAM
has a similar record of failure.
BD-R with many sessions seem to be problematic too. But here the
statistical base is too small. I have one BD burner and two out of
three BD-R media are hardly readable after they took 330 daily
sessions resp. 120 weekly sessions. Those which got written in a
single session still are readable after 2 years on the shelf.
Another BD-R with 340 sessions on it is well readable.
Shrug.
Some drives write poorly readable DVD-RW.
> This leads me to
> think there are consumer quality products and archive quality products,
Archive resp. backup needs checkreading after writing and in regular
intervals during the whole lifetime.
The media themselves contain a lot of checksum data. But a good
backup tool should add its own checksums to its data format anyway.
I use DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and BD-RE for backups.
Their failures are rare and not showing a common behavior as with
DVD+R DL, DVD-RAM or DVD-RW.
> It also leads me to worry about the DVD driver quality,
There are individually ill DVD drives around. I had one 10 months
ago. Samsung SH223C. It clearly indicated firmware bugs.
After some fight with the seller i got a new one: SH223B with
the same firmware revision as the SH223C. It works fine.
The seller assured me that both types are sold often and cause few
complaints by the customers.
In general you can buy any brand of burner. LG and Samsung are
quite widespread in german shops. Pioneer has a reputation of
high speed and high write quality, but it also has the longest
record of capricious firmware.
> Simply buying the most expensive product isn't the best clue
No brand is really safe from individually bad drives.
If you want to trade money for quality, then be ready to buy several
normally priced burners of independent brands and evaluate their
individual quality. E.g. LG, Samsung, NEC, ...
Buy and use the first one. Keep a log of its successes and failures.
If problems become annoying, buy the next one and watch whether
it is better.
Be aware that burn problems have a high potential to mislead the
observer. With some phantasy you can believe to see the weirdest
effects. A good log of media types, successes, and failures can help
to bring insight.
> consumer grade USB optical driver
> would it have a higher chance of high-quality if it happen to
> have a firewire plug?
Inside the portable boxes you find normal SATA drives. So burn
quality should not depend on the cable sockets offered. Nevertheless
the cable used can make a big difference in transmission quality.
Transmission problems would show up as errors during the write
process, not as read errors after seemingly good writing.
(They can, of course, produce corrupted payload data which
have correct media checksums and can be read without error.)
USB is quite reliable but sometimes imposes speed restrictions,
which seem to stem from the operating system drivers. At least there
are cases where growisofs burns DVD-R with 20x and libburn only
reaches 14x. In other cases libburn is faster than growisofs.
Both do essentially the same. Just in slightly different rythms.
eSATA has the same OS drivers as SATA but transmission quality seems
to suffer from the longer cabling. Well, my impression has few
statistical base because i have one computer and one drive with
eSATA. This pair has to be curbed to 1.5 Gbit/second, which is
not a trivial task, because the setting happens early during boot.
No experience with Firewire here.
I would advise to buy a SATA burner and an empty USB/eSATA/Firewire
box which allows you to put the drive inside. The box is more
expensive than the drive. So you want to keep it if the drive shall
get exchanged.
In germany the price of a USB burner is about the same as the
price for a USB box plus SATA burner.
Have a nice day :)
Thomas
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