with all the different brands of dvd recordable discs on the market sony ,datawrite,tuff disc,verbatim and the millions of others what is the best brand of disc to use or what should i look for on the dvd spindle

The simplest solutions are the best and they are often save you money

i ask this as in the past when i want to do a copy of my windows for backup n personal use or to copy some work files i found my self going through 3 to 4 discs just to burn 1 cd

The simplest solutions are the best and they are often save you money

"to copy some work files i found my self going through 3 to 4 discs just to burn 1 cd"

Could be a lot of things. Do you have a decent quality burner? Which burning program are you using? What speed are you burning at? Are you running any other programs while you're burning? Are all your devices IDE? If so, is the burner on the opposite channel from the data source? In other words, if you're copying files from the primary channel, the burner should be on the 2ndary channel. And if you're copying discs, it's generally better to copy to the HDD 1st, then back to the burner rather than copying "on the fly".

H898

I buy whatever I find on sale and never have any problems burning.

Your burner could also be starving for power.

How old is your burner? Burners are not made to last real long. They are disposable hardware.

Right now I have some Sony DVD-R 4x, some Verbatim DVD+R16x, and some Kypermedia CDR. I also have some Phillips and Imation on hand. All work fine. The last two burners I bought were Lite-on brand. Idon't bother with Litescribe as I am too cheap to pay extra for the disks. Same goes for DL DVD media and of course blueray. It is all about TCO (total cost of owership) with me.

As was inferred above don't push the max. burn speed. I do surf the net while burning. I don't think it is good to push more than that. I notice some lag when burning.

"Burners are not made to last real long."

I wouldn't necessarily say that. I have had several DVD Burners die on me, but my first one (that cast $260) is still kicking.

However, the age of a drive does bring other issues, most notably firmware. The firmware for DVD drives helps it to identify and correctly write to different brands/speeds of media.

My oldest drive will not burn to many current media because the firmware isn't able to correctly identify it. Unfortunately there is no new firmware for it. You should also try to look for new firmware for your drive.

Also, there are some drive/media combinations that just don't work well together. There are some sites out there that attempt to document this, but I'm not sure of the quality of their data (http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/DVDMediaFormats/). And this is not much of a problem as it was in the early days of DVD burners, but it still can pose a problem.

Michael J

Michael J

I too have the first CD burner I ever bought and it is still going strong and it too cost a fortune. That drive is a Plextor.

I stand by my statement that current drives are not built to last very long.

Personally I use TDK as they are the cheapest 'name brand' available down here in Australia. I would never buy another Laser brand disc or other 'non-name brand' discs as I (and other friends) have made many coasters. Also staying away from the max burn speed and/or leaving the computer to burn unbothered by other tasks is generally a wise thing to do.

Regards

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
R. Frost

"I stand by my statement that current drives are not built to last very long."

But, your first statement didn't say anything about current drives! ;)

I would agree with that. The reason our "first" drives are still running is that when you pay $200+ dollars as an early adopter there is a higher level of quality that is expected in such a product. CD/DVD drives are now a comodity.

Michael J

Michael J, Agreed. I thought I was refering to the current offerings, sorry for any confusion.