Heads Up on Memorex CD-RW Media

[Coral_Sea]

Memorex CD-RW disks give me heartburn. See http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/9973 for more horror strories about Memorex. I remember back in the bad old days of cassette tapes when Memorex produced junk then. What was I thinking when I bought this crap?

[Schotty]

I got some memorex cdrw's from way back that are dead now. Cant reformat em any more either...

[cage47]

Wanted to give y'all a few additions to this. I did a search a month ago on this subject. Not only Memorex, though that's what I had too, but cd-rw media in general. The recording media on a cd-rw is not as hearty as the cd-r. But that is also what gives the media it's properties for re-writing. And they only have a lifespan of 5-10 years depending on use or around 15 re-writes/formats. I had two I was using for system backups, like extended floppies. I had one that was giving intermittent write errors. And the other seemed fine. Then the first one became nearly unrecordable. And I had only about 7 total formats on it. The second only 3. But after closer inspection I noticed the outer edges of the silver media were chipping off the actual disk. Turns out this is where the toc is written to. So when I would go through a long burn but the process would fail at the last step this was why. My father who had a box of these cd-rw's also had three that were dead. He didn't know why either. Well he also had a memorex cd-rw cdrom. The belt on the drive broke and when he went to fix/replace it, and he opened the case he noticed a small pile of small silvery flakes fall out. I told him to look at the 3 cd's that wouldn't write any more and tell me what the edges of the silver media looked like. Sure enough, all three had large sections of the edges flaked off. I found on the usenet newsgroups that this is a characteristic of the media and there's little that can be done about this. In order for the recording media to be rewritable it had to be a less hearty media than the cd-r brands. so it doesn't last nearly as long. And this flaking on the edges is a result.

Personally with cd-r discs so cheap now there really isn't a need to worry about cd-rw's. I would give you some links to check on this but it was over a month ago. And I had this long post at LNO (I'd say search for it there but for all I know it might have been deleted. : )

[Coral_Sea]

[quote author=cage47 link=board=3;threadid=6342;start=0#60385 date=1045631423]
Wanted to give y'all a few additions to this. [/quote]

Thanks for the heads up. I didn't know that CD-RW was inherently inferior to CD-R. Might have to rethink whether to keep using CD-RW. The Verbatim CD-RWs that I have are okay, though.

[SuperRobotic]

thanks for that


my dad was just complaining a month ago how is cdrw stopped working and he lost all the stuff he saved on it

[cage47]

Have any of you noticed that flaking of the silver media on your cd's too?

On a side note this is related to that story about how people were getting around the security lockout on some new cd's by using marker to write on the outter sector. This is where your toc info is written and also where cd-rw rewriting info is written. Sorry I don't have the links to all these stories. It went for a couple weeks but it was fairly detailed from some guy that worked on development. It was very enlightening. As I was saying, With the price of cd-r's so low I don't really see a need for cd-rw's.

[Schotty]

I had some really cheap shit cdr that did that in their jewel cases and on the spindles. On touch the silver media would flake apart. IIRC it was the Computer Nation (whatever the Radioshack owned PC retailer was) $7 for 5 CDR packs that were being sold for some time, right before CompUSA bought them out and closed them (the much larger CompUSA was ~3 blocks down the road, and in a much more economically viable area -- strip mall).

These or the (and please remember the timeframe and prices of the era -- 1997-98) el-cheapo $50 50 CDR spindle that I used to get from CDR-Outlet. They said it was generic, no name brand and they were correct ... Should hav gotten something better.