It is not getting any easier to deal with optical media as time goes on.
I also still have to do quite a bit of audio CD-R burning, both for long term university library archiving, plus the Luddites. This wouldn't bother me so much, as I have been doing this for a long time and have procedures in place, but now the media is a moving target as it seems to approach end of life.
After much testing decades ago, we settled on MAM gold for archival with very good error rates and Taiyo Yuden for absolute lowest error rate. We looked for a sweet spot of speed and low errors for each drive we used. We test every burned archival disc with Plextools (and a Clover before that) and reject any with C2 errors. We seldom had a bad disc of either, but the MAMs consistently had a slightly higher error rate than T-Y, which always had an amazingly low error rate.
Then in 2015, T-Y, which had previously been acquired by JVC, announced it was abandoning the market completely and CMC was buying their technology. Here's a press release:
CMC Magnetics purchases Taiyo Yuden Technology
We are happy to announce that late last summer CMC Magnetics purchased the technology and manufacturing license for Taiyo Yuden optical media products.
This past June, JVC/Taiyo Yuden made the announcement that it would be stopping production of all optical media products at the end of 2015 and making a complete withdrawal from the market. JVC/TY's withdrawal left a huge void in the professional media market and CMC quickly seized the opportunity to purchase the technology to meet that need. CMC has committed to produce all current JVC skus and maintain the unmatched quality and consistency the professional market demands. With the help of Taiyo Yuden engineers, CMC has built dedicated production lines using the exact same processes, raw materials and strict quality control measures to ensure the TY quality is maintained.
The CMC made products will be branded as "CMC Pro" and all cartons will be labeled "Powered by TY Technology". Part numbers for the CMC Pro products will be very similar to the existing JVC part numbers. All current JVC part numbers start with "J" and the new skus will be exactly the same except they will start with "T".
Example:
JVC Sku - JCDR-ZZ-SB
CMC Pro Sku - TCDR-ZZ-SB
We bought the CMC version when we reordered, and while they are pretty good, the errors were consistently higher. I will continue to use these until shown a better alternative. If they use the same T-Y formula, it should last well - I have a "That's" branded T-Y burned in 1993 IIRC, and Plextools shows it to still be good. All MAMs we've tested that are about 25 years old also test fine.
Now I've run out of MAM golds, and I discovered the entire production has been acquired by what appears to be a duplication firm in Chattanooga TN, WTSMedia.com. Their T-Y rep, Lora, emailed me:
CMC Magnetics purchased the Verbatim brand name in 2019, and they also purchased the rights to use the Taiyo Yuden disc technology in 2015.
MAM-A was formerly Mitsui Advanced Media America, when the 3 Japanese companies had direct ownership. Verbatim was started by Mitsubishi. It's been an interesting industry.
I tried buying "gold" Verbatim archive CD-Rs from B&H, and found that the first couple of dozen all had C2 errors (some say these are still correctable, but others say still no good. I feel that we never used to have these, so why accept them now). And they are not cheap. These say Made in UAE, as I believe Falcon media is.
Gary Galo published some 2022 tests of CD-R and DVD-R media on ARSClist, and found that Falcon was pretty good. I'm not sure if it's cool to pass on his PDFs here.
Sorry for the length, maybe ripe for a new thread.
Topic: Back Up Your Stuff! 3 instances of every file makes me sleep better! (Read 10936 times)