Mac users: DVD +/- R media brand of choice? (1 Viewer)

Just wondering...

What media do you find works best for the CD/DVD drives
Mac uses in its computers under Leopard?

For me, I use TDK DVD-R

Works perfectly though as I noted in another thread, I see
that Leopard has problems mounting some of my discs after
they have been burned. I am finding out that this is a commonly
reported bug.

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

I hear great things about Verbatim discs, but some guy over on
Amazon, in their reviews, is going off about how Verbatim discs
do not work in Macs.

Happy to read otherwise here, Eric.

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

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.

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.

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.

Jari,

Your comments about Verbatim are a breath of fresh air. I have
to be honest, I have my doubts. Do a Google search of Verbatim
and Mac and you see widely reported posts about coasters.

...but I am willing to take a chance cause I hear great things about
Verbatim.

....thing is, where do they get off charging $15 more for a 100
spindle of DVD-R over TDK? TDK is about $22 and Verbatim is $38.
Is Verbatim really worth the premium?

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.

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.

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

-EJ

I like Sony DVD-Rs with my MacBook.

I decided to take a chance...

For years I have been using nothing but -R DVD media.

Today I ordered Verbatim +R media. From what I have been
reading, the +R is far more reliable than the -R. The only drawbacks
is that +R may have problems playing in drives older than 2003.

Using the +R may turn out to be the answer to my problems.

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.

Not that I had a problem burning DVDs itself but a problem
with Leopard showing that there was any data on it when I
would put the disc back in days later (see above).

Additionally any AVI material I put on DVD-Rs for friends
didn't always play on their DVD player. I am hoping I get
better results with the DVD+R.

Basically, this is just an experiment to see if I like the +
media any better than the -

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.

I always mount the disc after burning to make certain it's
burned. For some reason, days later, I put the disc in and
Leopard tells me it is blank. I shove it in another computer
and voila! the files are there. Strange.

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