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Date:	Tue, 15 Jun 2004 13:26:03 PDT7
From:	"J. R. Fox" <jr_fox@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Re: DVD writer recommendation

Content Type: text/plain

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jbrush@aros.net wrote:

> I think CD-R and its offspring suck, and I have not seen anything to cause me
> to believe DVD will be any different.

Hi John,

It is much too soon for me to comment on the latter. I have just begun to be able
to READ DVDs under eCS, and I'm grateful for that. The system that had the reader,
and now has a DVD-burner instead, is a small-form-factor box. As you may have seen
from my exchanges with HCM on this list, I'm still struggling to get *any* burning
capability going there.

> I have thrown away more CDs than I have
> kept, and that number is in the hundreds.

Very different from my experience on the all-SCSI tower. Once I stepped up to the
Plextor 12/10s (which has the buffer underrun technology, whereas the previous
burner did not), my coasters have become very rare and noteworthy events.
Multisession with RSJ is still kinda skating on thin ice, IMO, and I hesitate to go
beyond two sessions on any cd that matters. Multisession is where the chances of
getting a messed up cd with CRC errors really come in. In fact, if it's something
truly important, I will copy everything off of an existing cd, and add the deletions
| additions | changes to a "2.0" edition on a fresh blank, and file or toss the
original. I mean, the media is cheap enough in bulk, even if you take care to buy
the better quality media.

> I have had quite a few different R-R/W
> devices and they continue to make me a lot of coasters. I would say my success
> rate over the years is no more than 50 or 60 percent.

Something must be wrong, as Harry said, and I'm thinking it must be setup.

> I also have dozens of
> backup type CD-Rs made on an, at the time, state-of-the-art Plextor, which
> cannot even be read by any reader other than the that one device, which is
> carefully stored in the closet, in case I ever need it.

The lasers on certain older Plextor models did have a problem reading (and maybe
writing) certain media. I'm pretty sure that problem got corrected. At one time,
Plextor clearly was the best, but I think the economics of the market may have
dragged them down, in design & manufacturing quality.

> Even CDR/W fails, and who has hours and hours to wait while it is formatted?

I remain unconvinced about R/W. It sort of works on the Win platform, but those
packet-writers (In-CD, Easy-CD, DLA) all apparently can take a serious toll on
system stability, with most of the Win versions & installations I've seen. Anyway,
given the price of CD-R media, the economics of CD-RW just have not added up for a
long time. It could be a different story with test runs on rewriteable DVD, but
even there the media prices have come down a lot. Incidentally, I have seen
extensive test results on the web, rating the quality of various DVD media for
various DVD burners, and they report some very wide disparities in the reliability
of results, according to what you use for a given burner.

> Music CDs that burn 89% and die, or come up with more "pops" than Orville
> Redenbacher, data that burns, and cannot be read ( I am not talking about multi
> sessions, I am talking dead CDs) and so many that actually used to work and now
> deliver CRC errors no matter how clean and safe I keep them.

Haven't seen this myself, on the CDs I burn. (I burn *a lot* of CDs, but not that
many music ones.) Have recently found at least 3 SCOUG CDs from about 3 years ago
that are now unreadable.

> NEVER deliver throughput beyond what amounts to about 18X to 20X at the most.

The speed rating is skewed (like a lot of ratings on things you buy), to be
advantageous for mfr. advertising, but on the deceptive side for the consumer.

> I have used an 8X burner to copy from a 50X player, and the player cannot keep up.

How good is the player ? Cache settings ? (I think the SCSI bus throughput might
tend to minimize the chance of this happening, because I don't recall seeing that .
. . but I could be wrong.)

> I am talking Windows and OS/2 software. RSJ was a waste of money for me

RSJ worked great for me on the older system, for several years. So far, though, it
has been a total washout on the XPC. I'm hoping it's due to not having found the
right setup yet.

> I almost always boot windows to make a CD
> because the success rate with that software is much higher.

Nero is pretty good. (I'm talking full Nero 5x. The "lite" versions of 6 have not
impressed me that much.)

> I have lots of CDs
> that I made with RSJ, but most can only read on an OS/2 machine.

I've seen this go in either direction, "across the fence", but not that often.

> I can say that even tho I have had more than a few burners of various write
> speeds, I have NEVER had any degree of success burning beyond 4X. I use the
> test, and then burn mode, and honestly, even at 4X, half the time, it bombs out
> in the test mode, and there is little that pisses me off more than when the test
> works, and then the burn fails. Even with OS/2, the machine is off limits when
> burning a CD, and at 4X, that can take forever.

On the tower, I can burn at up to 12x, but I usually opted for 8x. Not the fastest,
but it has been quite reliable. I think RSJ told me that you need a bigger h/d
cache area, the higher a burn speed you go for. Test mode is generally a big waste
of time, IMO. The failures were rare (here, and on other systems I've used, running
that other OS), and if it does fail, you'll know a lot quicker and be out a dollar
-- at most -- for the bum cd.

> but with computer products, you can have two of
> the three options: cheap, fast, or good, and the industry always goes with the
> first two.....

Hey, that's in most industries, these days. Most mfr.s seem to be in a race for the
bottom, in terms of what they're willing to spend, and what the consumer seems
willing to spend.

> I continue to use hard drives for backups and storage.

With enough of a budget, and enough redundancy, that can be a viable strategy.
Still, there is no replacing a need for good capacity *removeable* storage. Whether
you get it from H/D trays, a good tape system (like DAT or AIT -- expensive !), CD
or DVD, it ranges from the very useful to being vital. I don't have my Zip-drive or
any media burning capacity working on the system I've been talking about, under eCS,
and it's becoming a royal pain. I have to make PK-Zip archives onto a FAT partition
with eCS (which I think and hope will preserve any EAs), then re-boot into W2K,
where I *can* xfer them to removeable media. Very roundabout and cumbersome.

> I am in no hurry to put nearly 5 gigs of
> data on a disk, and have it die at the end, or come up CRC error when used in a
> different DVD player, or even wait around while it burns and fails on the last
> few bits of data.

Well, that's a valid concern. OTOH, a relative of mine (a Win user) has been doing
DVD backups for some time now, with no apparent problem.

> No thanks, I think the technology sucks today, and will
> continue to suck in the future. Too much 'microsoft" mentality in this industry,
> and not enough quality research and development to create top notch, reliable
> hardware.

It is laughable whenver Gates gives a speech -- esp. to something like a
Congressional panel -- and bleats about innovation. Because they've pretty much
killed off most innovation.

Jordan

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