Another visit to ARC Computers this morning and I saw a spindle of BD-Rs on the shelf and decided to give them a try. While their website lists their BD-Rs as Generic/Ritek, I would never buy the Riteks, but these were worth a shot. It was $16.50 for a spindle of 10, making it $1.65 each, which wasn’t great value but wasn’t extortionate like many other places.
In fact, my last batch of CMCMAG-BA3’s were Mr. Data spindles of 10 from eBay. After all, Mr. Data is CMC Magnetics own “branding” for their own discs which generally come as clean white printable top discs. But my last discs were 4x rated – and these were 6x rated.
A quick check in the drives tells me they’re newer CMCMAG-BA5 media code discs. They are a dark brown-blue colour rather than the metallic chocolate of the older BA3’s.
One thing to note is that newer discs like this may not be supported in older burners. I have two LG GGW-H20L 6x Supermultiblue burners that still see some use today – their media code support lists extracted from their firmware gives no support for this media code and the speed is reported as 2x only. I suspect that burns may fail or quality will be suboptimal.
In the iHBS212 and iHBS312, the discs are overspeedable to 10x, so I selected a test disc burn at 10x on the newer iHBS312 to see what happens. The wiggly line when it reaches 10x (45MB/s) along with the buffer drops are unlikely (but possibly) to be due to my SATA interface (the onboard B75 chipset ports, using latest Intel iRST drivers). They may be attributed to the drive performing some W-OPC type strategy to determine write quality and any adjustments to the write process.
The readback TRT is good – funny how the drive isn’t allowing you to read back BD-Rs faster than 8x, but this was burnt faster than it was read!
Trying a scan of the disc in the iHBS312 at 4x without removing the disc from the drive – here are the results.
Horrible. While the TRT looks fine, the burn quality is worse than many of my aged discs despite the drive never exceeding 4x. In fact, it looks like those horrid Riteks after they’ve aged. YIKES! This is a good example of how scanning can be more sensitive to errors than a TRT is.
A reasonable thought is that the drive will probably need a sample to learn how best to burn the disc (especially overspeeded) so this is actually my THIRD sample in pursuit of quality. The first two were just as bad and I thought it was anomalous so I threw them out. Again, this was burnt on the iHBS312 (as I tend to focus on newer, presently available burners for newer media – the performance on older drives is less relevant and Lite-Ons are a favourite for quality testing).
The lesson is clear – do NOT overspeed.
So lets stick to the 6x rating and see how it fares. The burn itself went fairly swimmingly and had a P-CAV strategy, accelerating to 6x very quickly (unlike the CAV 6x strategy of my old LG GGW-H20L).
The TRT itself is perfect (again)!
The scan is … better, but it’s not of the quality I would expect from a CMC disc. In fact, it’s not the quality that I’d expect of a disc burnt at the rated speed just fresh in the burner (did not leave the burner between burn and scan).
One last chance. Lets try 4x. The lowest speed that the LiteOn supports with the media … no TRT this time as we’ve established that it doesn’t really say much.
All in all, even at 4x, this media struggles to redeem itself especially when compared with how its earlier cousin – the BA3 – performed. Here’s a not-clean, at least one year old scan of a BA3 and it’s hard to say this fresh burn is better than this one.
Conclusion
At least for the Lite-On drives, this media doesn’t seem to be a good choice to overspeed, despite the urge to do so “because the firmware lets you”. It’s not too bad if you stick to the rated speed – so do that. And I’ve lost half my spindle to testing, but no matter. There’s some things which optical media guys like myself just have to know.
The problem with these discs is that (at least on the iHBS312), the burns are poor out of the box when burnt at the rated speed. I cannot recommend a disc which doesn’t fulfill or exceed the average LDC <13 and maximum BIS <9 rules of thumb. CMCMAG-BA3’s were one of my “go to” media earlier, the same cannot be said for the CMCMAG-BA5.
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hey mate, i bought a pack of these and tried to burn data using Ashampoo Studio 14 and somehow it’s only burned the DCIM folders, but not the “PRIVATE” and some other folders from my DSLR. Do you know why this happened? I thought it should be as easy as burning dvds…lol?!
You’re right, fundamentally, burning a BD-R isn’t really much different from the user’s perspective than burning a DVD-R.
I have no solid idea why this might be the case, but it may be down to your choice of burning software. Check that it supports burning BD-Rs, and that it is also capable of burning hidden folders (in case those folders are of hidden type). Some software will omit hidden files by default. Also check that the files and folders are accessible – maybe it’s best to first copy it to a folder on your hard drive first.
If all else fails, I would suggest you try using Imgburn instead – it’s a small, free disc-burning utility with (generally) better support for drives, media and filesystems and a compact interface. Don’t be fooled by the name – it has evolved away from solely reading and burning ISO images, and can burn files to discs as well as video-type DVD’s and BDMV/BDAV discs as well.
– Gough
The results I got have nothing to do with yours. I used BD-R Verbatim MID CMCMAGBA5, so, same as yours. They were purchased in October 2020. The recorder is a Plextor BD-R PX-LB950SA (Lite-On iHBS212). I often clean the laser with my own disc. In a BD-R CMCMAGBA5 recorded at 4x and read also at 4x, the LDC (Avg) = 0.01 and the BIS (Avg) = 0.00 (total of 2667 readings for LDC and 37 for BIS). The results have nothing to do with the ones you got. They are exceptional. It is not only the quality of the BD-R that matters, the quality of the recorder and the state of the laser also matters. For example, if you never cleaned the laser, the results would be very bad. This is a few days of long-term disc life, but it is an excellent indicator. For the most important things I use old Panasonic stocks.
There are many factors at play when it comes to the burn quality, but many of them are not necessarily in your control. For example:
– The manufacturing quality can change over time – it’s well known that you get good batches and bad batches of disks even under the same branding and print. It wouldn’t surprise me if the manufacturing became better over time, to an extent.
– The same mediacode from different branding/print can vary in grade – buying the discs under Verbatim branding may not provide the same grade of quality control on the discs Mr. Data – so there is a chance that better discs are sorted to Verbatim.
– The cleanliness of the disc and mechanism – for retail sealed jewel case discs, I tend to find that the burns are usually better assuming not a single speck of dust has managed to adhere to the surface. The reason is that spindle discs sometimes are “patterned” by the printable layer of the disc below them and can take off some of the coating as flakes or as a “haze” due to outgassing on the surface.
– The condition of the drive – for example, the suspension on the lens assembly affects the speed and accuracy of drive focusing adjustments, the laser power and degradation over time with use affects the power output profile, the smoothness of the spindle bearings and laser head worm drive affects how well the tracking performs, especially with regards to wobble.
– The drive and firmware used – I’ve observed that many OEM drives I’ve purchased tend to have more issues with tracking and laser power (as well as laser failures) compared to retail drives. Drives labelled with premium branding may attract further quality checks. The age of the drive itself, even if it is based on the same model, the quality of initial calibration and the firmware version all can have an effect on burn quality.
– The temperature the drive is operating in – some people have noted that hotter drives produce worse burns.
– The cleanliness of your power supply – some cheap power supplies have known to cause poorer quality burns or increased burn failure rates.
Because of all of this, and more, there are many good reasons that taking a small sample is not representative of a mediacode at large, but people should take a consensus from looking at a variety of tests performed by a number of different sources. My burns on this batch were not particularly good which was part of the reason why I felt it was worth uploading the scans, but yours sound exceptionally good. Such high-quality results rarely ever come about “ordinarily” or “by coincidence” … as we all know, all it takes is for one speck of dust to ruin a scan. That being said, I’ve stopped using BD-Rs almost entirely for the past three years primarily due to cost, time, reliability and space limitations.
– Gough
HI! Thanks for the fast reply! You’re absolutely right and agree with what I wrote. Sampling is just representative of a particular batch. My surprise was the difference between yours and my results. I purchased my first CD recorder in the middle 90s. I always have a lot of care when selecting the discs. Today it is hard-to-find good discs, and they are pricey. The price I paid for a CD-R in the middle 90s was the same as a commercial audio CD! Close to Euro 20.00! For my audio recordings (Marantz CDR-620 pro recorder), I still have a large stock of gold Apogee (Mitsui), gold MAM-A, and Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs. The best? Well, cheaper Taiyo Yuden CD-R! For Bluray, as I said, my choice is the Panasonic Bluray (I think that just old stock is available. But I also use Verbatim 25Gb (CMC) and Philips 25Gb (Ritek) for some less important recordings. Ritek Bluray discs do not exceed the average LDC <13, but the maximum BIS is high, around 700 (average of 2).