burning a lot of coasters

[Mark Roach <mrroach@okmaybe.com>]

I recently acquired a dvd+rw drive for archival of a few hundred gigs of
document images and have been fairly disappointed with the performance
of the device. I have gotten a total of 7 good, 4 bad dvds from the
drive. It's a firewire device, I'm using growisofs as a normal user, and
this is the error I keep getting

Sep 15 20:55:23 imgburner kernel: Current sr00:00: sense key Medium Error
Sep 15 20:55:23 imgburner kernel: Additional sense indicates Write error
Sep 15 20:55:24 imgburner kernel: Current sr00:00: sense key Medium Error
Sep 15 20:55:24 imgburner kernel: Additional sense indicates Write error
Sep 15 20:59:46 imgburner kernel:  I/O error: dev 0b:00, sector 64

Does that really mean what it is saying, is this truly a problem with
the dvd medium? Hmm, that last message looks like it is not about the
burner at all, I wonder if there is something else going on...

I am running woody + backported growisofs, kernel 2.4.22 (stock debian
version)

I have also noticed on my own PC (compaq evo laptop w/ ide cd burner)
that I get a fair percentage of coasters as well. Is cd burning usually
such an uncertain process, and I'm just expecting the unlikely?

-Mark