I’ve been burning DVDs since the first DVD-R burners came out six or seven years ago. And, generally, DVD burning has been a dicier, more error-prone proposition than CD burning, whether it’s just data DVD-Rs or video DVDs. The type and brand of media has always been a question and a variable.
At work I’ve found a brand that’s given me very consistent results — we buy DVD-R media in quantities of 500 and we see at most 1% bad discs, which is pretty good in my experience. We use the Ritek brand, which meets our needs as a balance of quality vs. price.
CDRzone has just posted its summary rundown of blank DVD brands, with some predictable results. Our brank Ritek comes in as “Recommended,” the level below “Premium,” which makes sense to me.
Their “Recommended” media is generally consistent disc-to-disc, though there is variance between batches. It’s cheaper than “Premium,” the highest grade, but is good enough to represent a good value.
The “Premium” rank has brands I’d expect, like Verbatim, which is also the easiest to find.
Prices for blank DVD media can vary, but I’ve found that it is not worth it to cheap. Back when blank DVDs were closer to a buck each, I bought cheapies for 8 bucks for a ten-pack and had 4 fail on me.
I’ve always found these sorts of ratings useful, because I’d rather know what brands and media to avoid rather than to have to find out the hard way on my own.
I know it sounds obvious, but if your data is worth anything, it’s worth spending a little extra money for the better media. This is all the more important for denser media that packs more data on a disc. So for plain DVDs it’s more important than with CDs, and even more important for dual-layer DVDs that hold 9 GBs. I can only imagine the problems we’ll see with early HD-DVD or Blue Ray media with 25 GBs and more.
So, for DVD+/-Rs, I recommend going with this list’s “Premium” or “Recommended” brands, and avoiding the “Budget Media.” Memorex is probably the worst, if for no other reason than it’s ubiquitous, often on sale cheap, and still somehow has brand recognition as something worth buying. But the quality control is shit, and I’ve had spindles of 100 that have 30 bad discs. Ugh, who needs that?
I’ve worked in a university unit that also has tech support people, and I’m amazed at how many data loss disasters they’re called on to fix that could have been easily averted with just a simple CD-R or DVD-R backup onto media that wasn’t bargain basement.
And a final tip — if it’s really important, make two copies. They extra buck or two is worth it if you lose a disc or one copy fails.
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