Please share your experiences with CD-RWs... I've been using them frequently lately, but of the 10 I bought, I've already had to throw 3 away because they simply became unreadable after a few burns and quick-erase sessions. Now I'm baffled because as far as I know, these things are supposed to be rewritable hundreds of times.

I'm burning them at 4x (old generation burner, this is max) and the CD-RWs I use are (cheap) Gigamaster ones.

It seems there are some issues with some burner/brand media. I would try several different brands and settle on the one that has best results. For instance, I have three Sony burners in three different computers. They are all different generations: 4X, 10X, 24X. These are RW speeds. One brand of media works fine in the two oldest, but with the newest, I get a lot of duds (Imation), even slowing the speed doesn't help. But another brand works well in the two newer ones but, won't even burn a second time in the oldest one (Verbatim). I wish I knew why.

No problems, but my DVD-RW drive is still brand new and I even updated the firmware. Have only 2 DVD-RWs and 1 CD-RW that I got some months back -been using that several times. Perhaps you should check for some updates to your drives firmware? Even if it goes wrong, CD-RW drives cost only about 50 bucks nowdays...

[ February 23, 2005, 16:10: Message edited by: Wirhe ]

I've got the latest firmware, I updated it a year or so ago. And even then it was hard to find it still, considering how old this burner is...

Well...I'll give you as much information as I possibly can...since you asked.

The first CD-RW was in my dad's computer. The drive was generic and the program that came with it was crap. I wasn't able to ever make a successful burn on Memorex, Jensen, TDK, and any other blank media except for the 650MB disks from Sony, at a blazing 2X speed. It was a 4X max drive, but the burn would fail no matter what if you tried to burn at 4X....Sony disk or not. So that's what I had to use for awhile.

Then I got tired of that P.O.S. and bought my dad a new CD-RW drive and downloaded Nero. It was older and could only burn at 8X max...but we were able to use Sony, Verbatim, and Memorex media...but it had some issues with 700MB disks, sometimes it would burn to them, but I couldn't count on it.

Then I got my Dell laptop with a 24X CD-RW. I've been able to burn to every brand of media that I've put I've put in the drive at least 16X or higher.

So I guess with time the CD-RW drives get better at accepting the brands of media they'll burn to...and it might not be the firmware that's causing it too...it could be the actual drive (i.e. the laser or the circuitry). :rolling:

I personally never had a good experience with CD-RWs. Have used some cheap ones and the not-so-cheap ones (Phillips of a few years ago), and all of them tend to start corrupting files, or become unreadable on non-CD writer drives, or other weird things (one of them eventually became unerasable, another would simply block the drive and I could only eject it after a restart). I eventually just settled for USB sticks. It's a more expensive investment, but it saves you the headache.

I've had two external 4x burners. The first one, a Hewlett Packard, was the absolute worst drive that I could have bought. It burned ok for a couple hundred burns, and then just caved in. Doing exactly what you're describing, Tal; disks just couldn't be reused, as the drive was destroying them. I RMA/Waranteed it back to the company several times before I just heaved the whole thing in the trash, and went out an bought a Sony 4x. I don't know how many good burns I've gotten with it. Never again will I buy an optical drive from HP. Sony has me bent over their DRU-500a (first generation 4x dvd+- burner), and their entire engineering department has gone to the dogs, so Sony's out as well.

I've gone strictly to Liton. They're not the best in terms of write quality (Pioneer), but they're good for the money.


Anyway, some drives are really finicky about media, and other drives are just poorly engineered. Also, I believe the High Speed disks are burned using a completely different write strategy (not just Z-CLV/CAV, but the power modulation on the laser), and don't last long with older drives. Sounds like you've got a drive going out on you. If it works anything like mine, the drive will suddenly upgrade itself to a 24x reader (from a 6x reader), with the short-field-runway-takeoff RPM to match.

When my HP drive went out, it must've gone out with a faulty RPM governor. I'm lucky not to have plastic shrapnel in my arms...