Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

Verbatim works well here, but I blame the device before the media in most cases. What brand DVRs were used to make the disks?

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

I don't have a Mac, but Staples has a very good deal on blank DVD media. Sony 100 pack ( -/+) for 23 bucks.

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

Ron, I stick mainly with brands which manufacture their own discs, so I know what I am getting every time. Most brands just relabel their discs and you don't know what you are getting. Verbatim discs absolutely work on Macs and are one of the best. I did get one spindle of TDK and they have worked fine, but I'll know more in 4 or 5 years. Marginal discs don't tend to last long term. I mainly use Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden, which are only available online.

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

In my house we have old iMac and MacBook and I have used 80% Verbatim DVD-Rs with both. That brand hardly never fails. Works very nicely with DVD/Blu-ray-players also.

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

Quite a few guys in the recording biz here determined V was the most reliable many years ago.
Mitsui Gold was another favorite, but very expensive.
I have not bothered to keep up since then.

The 95123 in dual and 95078 (single layer) are the current favorites.

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

Ron, my personal take is not that $38 is too much for 100 DVDs, but that $22 is suspiciously cheap. I rely on these for archiving and saving $15 is so completely not worth it to wonder if the discs will fail. I have gone through a few spindles just "extracting" data from failing discs and burning them to Verbatim or TY. I've never had a Verbatim or TY disc fail over the long run.

The comments on Mac and coasters may have a lot more to do with the generally awful optical drives Apple puts in their computers. I haven't used an Apple supplied optical drive in about 6 years. I have several Pioneer drives, which I have put on both my Macs and also have a couple in external housings. Also, never push your burning speed. I burn no faster than 24x (usually 16x) on CDs and usually burn DVDs at 4x, but never over 6x. Burn speed is extremely important in the long term.

I can't recommend strongly enough replacing your optical drive with the latest Pioneer. Swapping it is incredibly easy on G5s and Pros. Takes 5 minutes max. The only thing you might need is to install a patch you can get from patchburn.de to fully incorporate the drive into the system. it's not needed with Toast, but might be for iMovie, iDVD & iTunes.

This should be the correct model. You have a Pro, right? Best $40 you'll ever spend.

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

There is no "the" best brand when it comes to blanks. The key to successful burns is the drive you use and blanks that work well WITH THAT DRIVE. Avoid burning at the highest speed, unless you're in a real hurry, switch back a gear or two. Keep the firmware of your drive updated, as burn strategies are added/improved to the drive (laser strength used per media, etc.). If a drive doesn't have burn strategies for your blanks (cheap and/or unsupported media), it will guess what the best burn strategy *MIGHT* be. Maybe it will work well, maybe not. You'll find out over time.

As has been mentioned before, your typical brands (Sony, Maxell, TDK, and so on) can in actuality be manufactured anywhere, by anyone, so if one batch worked fine for you, the next you buy of the same brand might not.

Taiyo Yuden are generally regarded as the highest quality brand, but as already mentioned, cannot be found in stores, only online. Mitsui media is highly regarded as well (again, stressing what has already been mentioned), and burning speed definitely makes a difference, certainly if you want to keep your data longer than a few months or so.

As always when it comes to data, you get what you pay for. If you don't need your burned disc to work everywhere you drop it in and/or down the road (i.e. archival), get the cheapest you can find. But don't complain later if you can no longer read the data off it.

-Christian

PS: In one of my previous jobs in a software company we were burning dozens of discs per week (first just CDs, later also DVDs) for all kinds of purposes: for testing, customers, archiving, you name it, and we only used brand name blanks, in our case from Mitsui. Those discs could have ended up in a run-of-the-mill Windows desktop or an ancient HP-UX machine with a SCSI CD-ROM and anything in between, so quality was very important to us.

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

Verbatim has always been my #1 choice for dvd's I've had much less failures with them over any other brand.

-EJ

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

I like Sony DVD-Rs with my MacBook.

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

Have you had troubles burning DVDs? I've always bought whatever was one sale, both CDs and DVDs. Though I've not burned many discs on my Mac, I've had no troubles with free-after-rebate DVDs. I've not seen this problem on PCs either.

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

I see. When I burn a disc, I put it back in to check the burn was successful and haven't seen this issue. I have seen burned DVDs (from iDVD) that played on my DVD player but not on other people's. But I assumed it was their DVD player's limitation.

Let us know how it turns out.

Re: Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice?

That's unsettling. Now I need to recheck my backups...