I have a BD-R drive (two, in fact), but I don't often burn them and haven't bought anything lately. What discs have you tried lately?
It may be that the drive lens is dirty or something else happened to it which makes burning harder.
I'm burning everything on Windows with CDBurnerXP (which is free), and I'm not familiar with Linux burning, so can't tell if there's anything software-wise that may be a problem. I know that you prefer to use Linux, but if you have Windows I'd suggest that you at least try doing some burns on it, which will help you decide if the problem is with the software or not. (And please stop using 'windooze'. It makes you seem a little kid. If you're talking with Linux people you can call it whatever you want and snicker, but if you're in the company of Windows users please show some respect if you want to get some in return.)
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I've tried various types of Verbatim brand (including the dreaded HTL media, which seems to get bad reviews everywhere, but ironically seemed to work better than most of the other brands I tried), Xlayer, Prodye and recently MediaRange which had excellent reviews, but out of 5 discs all 5 failed (I haven't tried any more ... considering to sell the rest on Ebay along with the drive). The thing is, that, according to my knowledge, even the same brand and type can be from a different manufacturer in the end and have different quality.
Testing if I get any better results with CDBurnerXp is actually a good idea. It's not practical as a long term solution, but it would rule out software problems, so I'll give it a try.
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There's something very important to keep in mind which you haven't mentioned. Disc life. I'm worried that all those cheap discs you have might not (probably don't) have the proper manufacturing to make them last as long as possible. Bad manufacturing can seriously reduce the lifetime of disc media even if the burn failure rate isn't high.
I hope it wouldn't happen but those cheap discs might bite you in the butt if they start failing randomly a few years down the line. Definitely keep them in a cool location so they last longer. But I'd strongly suggest going for better quality discs in the future for anything you definitely wouldn't want to lose.
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The "disc life" aspect was in included in my statement that I am aware that it (quote) "isn't failsafe". Again, if something is important, it goes both to BD-R and an external harddrive. Of course, in the worst case scenario, the BDR might just give uo when the drive fails. If I have something extremely important I might just burn it on two (different) media and invest a bit more. Most of my data usually is just important enough that I either don't backup it up longterm at all, or that cheap media is fine. That's also the reason why the media I had used before lasted as long as it did.
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Yes, I always reduced the speed to 2x on those noname discs I had before. However, with the media I recently bought, speed is often detected incorrectly, meaning that 4x is the slowest I can choose. This may be a software issue and I will try CDBurnerXP and see if it's any different there, but in my experience the software only gives me the settings as they are reported by the drive, so it's much more likely, that the old firmware on my drive just doesn't get along with new media.
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I have a Blu-Ray burner, use memorex discs with the free software ImgBurn to do backups on occasion. Never had any issues.
Also, if you want long-term data backups you should look into M-Discs which are a special type of DVD/BDR disc that are rated to last 1000 years by the US Department of Defense.
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Hehe, yeah I heard of M-Discs even seen them sold somewhere. If you ask me, 1000 years is a marketing joke, it's not very likely that there's even a BD-drive that could read them in a 1000 years and what are my descendants gonna do if the media doesn't keep up with the promise? Sue a company that went out of business like 500 years ago? Anyway, it's probably very good discs, so fine, if I ever want to preserve something very important I might consider it.
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Hi,
since there's usually a lot of tech-savvy, well equipped people here in this community, I thought, it couldn't hurt to ask for advice. I know, optical drives are so last century, but maybe someone here also got a BD-writer and cares to share some information? You're basically my last hope.
A few years ago, I bought a BD-writer because I needed a backup solution for big amounts of data. I handle a lot of large video files from my sat-receiver on a daily basis (I dvr pretty much everything that seems even remotely interesting). I am aware, that optical media and BD-R in particular isn't failsafe, but the 8GB limit on DVD-R isn't practical either. And while I also backup on an external harddrive, drives can fail, stuff might be accidentally overwritten or deleted. With some things, I just wanted to have an extra backup.
Now my problem is: I just can't find any reliable, affordable media any more. Back then, when I bought the drive, I also got a cakebox of no-name BD-R 25GB (Nierle Prodye) which worked fine. Not fast, but they worked. Now, they don't sell that particular type of media any more and whatever other discs I tried, I get about 75% trash. I admit, I didn't even try any of the real expensive media, because, when I would have to think which kind of data is even worth being backed up, it would kinda defeat the purpose.
Maybe it's because I use cdrecord/k3b on linux to record those discs.
Maybe it would work better with some fancy commercial software, but I don't really want to move all the data to my windooze partition every time. And it did work before.
Maybe I just made the worst possible choice when buying that BD-writer. It's an ASUS BW-16D1HT. There's no firmware support from Asus at all. Firmware is still at 1.01 while similar writers from LG or Pioneer seem to receive regular firmware updates, possibly increasing media compatibility.
I read, that it's a rebranded LG drive of some sorts, that it can be cross-flashed with LG firmware, but I cannot find any human-readable instructions in English on how to do this and/or if even it's possible for that particular drive.
Any advice, would be welcome, as long as you don't tell me I should've bought a stack of 4TB usb-drives in the first place. I know that now. I would like to know if there's any way to get it working again, not that there's better ways to backup data. Oh and here's your obligatory giveaway, feel free to join it and bump the thread, even if you don't have any advice. Thanks in advance.
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