Media Alert

Writing CDs has today become very popular in homes, schools, offices as well as many other professional institutions. Youngsters use it to exchange DivX movies and MP3s while offices use it to take backups of their important data. There are even those who make a living out of it by duplicating or creating CDs for their clients. The market today is flooded with a huge variety of CD-R media, known brands, some totally unknown brands, and some with no brand at all! And if that wasn’t enough, their prices range all the way from Rs 10 to Rs 40 a piece. Do more expensive ones offer better performance, give you more storage space, or are they more reliable? 

It was exactly this question that prompted us to do this story on the various CD-R media available in the market. We went out and bought ourselves 13 different brands of media, which included not only known brands, but some unknown names like Fighter, Alfa and Moser. We found that most branded CD-Rs come with jewel cases. Though jewel cases adds to the cost of CD-Rs, we found the difference in prices too high to be the only reason for the higher cost. An option available in this case is to buy empty jewel cases if you need them. Jewel cases are of course the best way to store your burnt CDs as they keep the CD-R suspended in mid air and covered. So there is very little chance of dust build up and frictional damage with the dust particles. However for short-term storage needs, such as exchanging MP3s, Div-X movies, or sending pictures to friends, you might not need a jewel case. But remember to always keep your media away from heat, humidity and dust. And if you do need to clean your CD surface, then use a soft dry cloth to clean from the inside to the outside, and never in circles. 

Burning data

The first thing we did was to burn 650 MB of data on them and check if there was any significant variation in results between different media. We used five different brands of CD writers to check compatibility with different drives in the market. At the time when we got the media, 16x was most common. (It’s possible that by the time you read this article, 24x and even 32x would be available). So, we did all our tests at 16x and noted the time taken. To ensure consistent results, we burnt a single brand of media on each drive at least twice. This meant each media was tested at least 10 times (twice on each writer).

A quick look at the results table shows that overall the performance of all the media was as good as each other, with maximum difference being only 20 secs. However, what was more interesting was that there were three occasions on which a particular brand of media refused to work at all with a particular CD-writer. What this means is that although the overall compatibility of the media is very good, there might times when a particular brand won’t gel with a particular writer. So, it’s always best to buy 5 or 10 and check that it doesn’t give any compatibility problems with your CD-Writer before buying larger quantities. 

Over burning

Next, we used the over burn test in Nero, to check how much extra data each CD-R could handle, and checked if there were any major differences. Here also the results were quite consistent, and the maximum difference was around 15 MB, between the Fighter and Writex media. This extra space on CDs can be a lifesaver, when you have a file or multiple files that go a little over the 700 MB mark. 

Torture tests 

Our next set of tests focused on the durability of the CD-R media, when subjected to heat, dust and humidity. So, the first thing we did in this test was to burn 650 MB of data on to each CD-R, and then leave them in a bucket of water for 5 mins. They were then taken out, left to dry and then cleaned with cotton.

Finally, they were put into a CD-ROM, and the data was transferred back to our hard drive. This was to check if all the data was still readable or not. In this test too all the CD-Rs managed to survive. 

In two separate tests, we left the media in a bucket of water for 5 minutes (left) and in the sun for 2 hours, after which upon testing they performed fine

Our other test in this section was the heat and dust test. So for this we took the media outdoors, and left them to bake under the hot summer sun for two hours. This also gave ample time for dust to gather on their surface, and test their resistance against sunlight, heat, and UV radiation. 

Like in the other test, we cleaned all the CDRs and then popped them into our CD-ROM drive to check if they were okay. Amazingly, all the CD-Rs again had no problem at all. We tried reading these CDs on multiple CD-ROM drives, but the results remained the same.

Verdict

Overall, what these various tests show is that at least in the short run, even the fairly unknown brands have no problem standing up to the big boys. So, for things like transferring data from one system to another, exchanging MP3s with friends or sending your snaps to friends and relatives, the cheaper and fairly unknown brands will do just as well as the more expensive ones. 

However, if you need to store critical data, such as accounts information, or system backups, for long periods of time, then the branded ones might give you an edge. We found that most of the branded media had some kind of special coating to protect them from things like, heat, sunlight and humidity, and even the occasional scratch. And most of them also come with their very own plastic jewel case for safekeeping.

Sachin Makhija