RITEK Pro CD-R Media

[Ian]

As the world’s largest manufacturer of optical storage media, Ritek doesn't need much of an introduction. The company got its start in 1988 and quickly established itself as a leader in the industry by producing the first CD in Taiwan. Ritek raised the bar once again a few years later by producing the country's first DVD and recordable DVD-R media. Today, Ritek continues to produce recordable CD, DVD, Blu-ray media as well as a variety of flash based storage products including USB flash drives, memory cards and SSDs.

While many consumers, including myself, have transitioned from optical media to cloud and flash based storage, there is still a large demand for recordable CD and DVD media in healthcare, education, government and business environments. These areas rely heavily on optical discs for large volume duplication, data storage and to store and transfer data generated by medical imaging devices.

To meet these needs, Ritek recently launched its new line of RITEK Pro media. Designed with professional users in mind, these high-quality CD-R and DVD-R discs offer superb performance, compatibility most of the popular drives on the market, high consistency with low variation from one batch to another and a shelf life of 60 years. Ritek's new media is also available with a shiny silver surface as well as thermal white, inkjet white and waterproof glossy printable surfaces.

Ritek Pro CD-R Types.png (100.82 KiB) Viewed 9449 times

A short time ago, Ritek USA sent me a few spindles of their new RITEK Pro CD-R media. They all had the same manufacturer code (97m15s17f) and what appears to be Phthalocyanine dye. Ritek has been using this ATIP code and dye type for many years and is well supported by drive manufacturers

Ritek Pro CD-R Info.png (28.17 KiB) Viewed 9449 times

The only difference between these discs was the surface. As you can see below, the printable, white surface goes all the way from the hub to the edge. Ritek also claims that there is no color difference between the hub and the rest of the disc.

Ritek Pro CD-R Surfaces.png (230.53 KiB) Viewed 9449 times

Ritek Pro CD-R Top and Bottom.png (348.88 KiB) Viewed 9449 times

In progress....

[Ian]

Aside from price, the things people look look at most most when buying recordable media is longevity, compatibility, writing quality, and consistency. For example, if you're buying media rated at 52x, you want to be able to write at that speed with the drives you own. Also, you want your data to be readable now as well as long into the future.

Longevity of recordable media is something that's hard to evaluate. Without storing media for months, or even years, under different conditions, its hard to determine whether or not its a good medium for archiving data. In the past, the Library of Congress and the National Institute of Standards and Technology did comprehensive studies that looked at optical disc longevity, but I haven't seen a good one in at least a decade.

With this in mind, we're going to focus mostly on the compatibility, writing quality and consistency with the RITEK Pro DVD-R media:

Compatibility - Will the drive write to it at its rated speed (or better)?

Writing quality - Do the C1/C2 errors and Jitter rates stay within an acceptable range?

Consistency - Is the performance and writing quality consistent from one drive to another? Is it consistent from one batch to another? This also applies to the manufacturing of the discs itself as well as the printable surface.

The next issue to tackle here was to decide which drives to use. Instead of using a bunch of old drives, I decided to go with those that are currently available at retail. This meant that, aside from the LG BH16NS40, I ended up buying a number of new drives. All of them were manufactured within the last year or two and were equipped with the latest firmware available from the manufacturer.

Drives and firmware used:

LG BH16NS40 (1.03)
Lite-On iHAS124 F (CL9N)
Plextor PX-891SAF (1.JI)
LG GH24NSC0 (LY00)

To do the write quality testing, I used the Lite-On iHAS124 and Opti Drive Control.

[Ian]

Okay... finally some results. First up are the discs burned by the Lite-On iHAS124. The results were quite good with the silver, inkjet and thermal discs. For whatever reason though, there were a lot more C1 errors on the waterproof disc.

RITEK Pro (Silver):

Lite-On iHAS124 - Ritek Silver CD-R Quality.png (164.77 KiB) Viewed 9294 times

RITEK Pro (Inkjet):

Lite-On iHAS124 - Ritek Inkjet CD-R Quality.png (171.73 KiB) Viewed 9294 times

RITEK Pro (Thermal):

Lite-On iHAS124 - Ritek Thermal CD-R Quality.png (163.94 KiB) Viewed 9294 times

RITEK Pro (Waterproof):

Lite-On iHAS124 - Ritek Waterproof CD-R Quality.png (171.06 KiB) Viewed 9294 times

[Ian]

Next up is the Plextor PX-891SAF. As you can see, the write quality is quite good across all of the discs.

RITEK Pro (Silver):

Plextor PX-891SAF - Ritek Silver CD-R Quality.png (104.97 KiB) Viewed 9294 times

RITEK Pro (Inkjet):

Plextor PX-891SAF - Ritek Inkjet CD-R Quality.png (103.18 KiB) Viewed 9294 times

RITEK Pro (Thermal):

Plextor PX-891SAF - Ritek Thermal CD-R Quality.png (101.48 KiB) Viewed 9294 times

RITEK Pro (Waterproof):

Plextor PX-891SAF - Ritek Waterproof CD-R Quality.png (105.01 KiB) Viewed 9294 times

[Ian]

Here is the LG BH16NS40. The write quality was again quite good across all of the discs.

RITEK Pro (Silver):

LG BH16NS40 - Ritek Silver CD-R Quality.png (164.73 KiB) Viewed 9074 times

RITEK Pro (Inkjet):

LG BH16NS40 - Ritek Inkjet CD-R Quality.png (163.07 KiB) Viewed 9074 times

RITEK Pro (Thermal):

LG BH16NS40 - Ritek Thermal CD-R Quality.png (162.97 KiB) Viewed 9074 times

RITEK Pro (Waterproof):

LG BH16NS40 - Ritek Waterproof CD-R Quality.png (166.21 KiB) Viewed 9074 times

[Ian]

And finally the LG GH24NSC0.

RITEK Pro (Silver):

LG GH24NSC0 - Ritek Silver CDR Quality.png (164.82 KiB) Viewed 9068 times

RITEK Pro (Inkjet):

LG GH24NSC0 - Ritek Inkjet CDR Quality.png (166.05 KiB) Viewed 9068 times

RITEK Pro (Thermal):

LG GH24NSC0 - Ritek Thermal CDR Quality.png (161.24 KiB) Viewed 9068 times

RITEK Pro (Waterproof):

LG GH24NSC0 - Ritek Waterproof CDR Quality.png (161.66 KiB) Viewed 9068 times

[Ian]

I've been meaning to post some results with these RITEK PRO CD-R discs for awhile now. Work and home projects got in the way. And no.. these aren't the new Circle Guard discs.

[Dartman]

Well I guess they're going for places that make small backups and like that to disks that have to last. I've been going through my old HD DVD movies to make playable backups with my old LG H20L and I have found several disks that refuse to read now and they look perfect.
There are others that have backup issues due to seamless branching and some that have a weird clouding on the surface that polishes off, but some just refuse to read so maybe the disk is bad now or has gone bad after all these years sitting in their cases. Many of these are unopened till now when I found out Make MKV will mostly make working backups of my disks.

[Ian]

I had to clean out my office so that an electrician could get in there and I tossed out a bunch of media in the process. Some of the cheaper stuff was yellowing and just looked horrible. I'm glad I never burned any important data onto them.

[Dartman]

Well we both know how crappy some of the plethora of cheap media we all used to get. I'm surprised any of the pressed movies I have got clouded just sitting in a shrink wrapped box in my houses somewhere all these years. I wonder how good those supposed 100 year life archive media they were selling will actually hold up seeing how none of us will be around to test them and who knows if anything will be able to read them. I bought all of the verbatim good media the office stores were blowing out to change to the crappy life cheap stuff. Now I'm trying to get acceptable bd media to burn blu Ray and ulhd movies to.
I still have cake boxes full of test burns from when we were all buying burners trying to find the best combination of quality and speed in a burner. Mostly throwing everything on large drives and playing them with plex now on the network to my set up out front.