Moser Baer Zebra DVD-R Media

[Ian]

This is a work in progress....

Moser Baer was founded in 1983, with a focus on digital storage. It was in 1999, that Moser Baer set up a high-capacity plant to manufacture recordable Compact Disks (CD-Rs) and recordable Digital Versatile Disks (DVD recordables), with a natural progression into recordable Blu-ray (BD-R) in 2007. At its peak, Moser Baer was exporting around 85 percent of its production with a presence in over 100 countries. Unfortunately, due to a number of mitigating factors, the company was no longer able to remain solvent and ordered liquidated due to its bankruptcy on 20 September 2018.

In 2020, Vinpower acquired and took over full production of the most common slate of Moser Baer media commodities, primarily optical discs and flash media, including USB and SSD storage products. In order to accommodate the full complement of digital storage users, Moser Baer’s digital storage product lines include both high end professional grade media along with more price sensitive consumer grade items.

MBI Zebra and Safari Media.png (269.87 KiB) Viewed 19134 times

The initial offerings will focus on the Safari and Zebra lines of recordable CD’s and DVD’s in select global markets across North and South America, parts of Asia, and Europe.

[Ian]

As you can see, Vinpower has gone all in on the zebra theme. There are zebra stripes on the top of the discs as well as the packaging. There's even a few zebras hanging out under a tree on the side of the spindle. One thing not here is the country of origin. The packaging doesn't say where these discs were manufactured. If I had to guess, they were manufactured in China or Taiwan rather than India.

MBI Zebra DVD-R Spindle 1.png (322.51 KiB) Viewed 19134 times

MBI Zebra DVD-R Spindle 2.png (303.64 KiB) Viewed 19134 times

MBI Zebra DVD-R Spindle 3.png (335.19 KiB) Viewed 19134 times

MBI Zebra DVD-R Spindle 4.png (322.47 KiB) Viewed 19134 times

Again... more zebra stripes. This time on the top of the disc. If zebras aren't your thing, Vinpower will be offering the discs with other surfaces (inkjet printable, thermal printable, silver top, etc.).

MBI Zebra DVD-R Top and Bottom.png (267.81 KiB) Viewed 19134 times

The Zebra discs use the same MID as Moser Baer's original 16x DVD-R media (MBI 01RG40).

MBI Zebra DVD-R Info 1.png (46.45 KiB) Viewed 19109 times

[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 16x, 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 Moser Baer Zebra DVD-R media:

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

Writing quality - Do the PI (Parity Inner), PIF (Parity Inner Fail) 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:

Lite-On iHAS124 F (CL9N)
Plextor PX-891SAF (1.JN)
LG GH24NSC0 (LY00)
Optiarc AD-5290S+ (1.RN)
LG BH16NS40 (1.03)

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

So what are "good" results supposed to look like? When testing with the iHAS124 and ODC, the PI errors should not exceed 280 and the number of PIF errors should stay below 4. Since POF errors are uncorrectable, we really don't want to see any of them at all.

As a baseline, I tested some DVD-R media from a few other manufacturers as well as Moser Baer's Pro Select DVD-R media.

Sony 16x DVD-R (SONY16D1):

Lite-On iHAS124 - Sony DVD-R Quality.png (192.39 KiB) Viewed 19110 times

Verbatim 16x DVD-R (MCC 03RG20):

Lite-On iHAS124 - Verbatim DVD-R Quality.png (202.61 KiB) Viewed 19110 times

Taiyo Yuden 16x DVD-R (TYG03):

Lite-On iHAS124 - Taiyo Yuden DVD-R Quality.png (191.94 KiB) Viewed 19110 times

Ritek Pro 16x DVD-R (MXL RG04):

Lite-On iHAS124 - Ritek Silver DVD-R Quality.png (211.74 KiB) Viewed 19110 times

Moser Baer Pro Select 16x DVD-R (MBI 01RG40):

Lite-On iHAS124 - MBI Pro Select DVD-R Quality.PNG (168.47 KiB) Viewed 19110 times

[Ian]

None of the drives were able to write to MBI's Zebra DVD-R media at 20x or 24x. However, all of them wrote to it at its rated speed (16x). The writing quality was also pretty good for the most part. The PI rates were fairly low and, aside from a few spikes near the end of a few discs, the PIF rates stayed within the acceptable range.

Lite-On iHAS124 F:

Lite-On iHAS124 - MBI Zebra DVD-R Quality.PNG (141.47 KiB) Viewed 19032 times

Plextor PX-891SAF:

Plextor PX891SAF - MBI Zebra DVD-R Quality.png (148.49 KiB) Viewed 19032 times

LG GH24NSC0:

LG GH24NSC0 - MBI Zebra DVD-R Quality.png (148.06 KiB) Viewed 19032 times

Optiarc AD-5290S+:

Optiarc AD-5290S - MBI Zebra DVD-R Quality.png (127.62 KiB) Viewed 19032 times

LG BH16NS40:

LG BH16NS40 - MBI Zebra DVD-R Quality.png (145.41 KiB) Viewed 18433 times

[Ian]

Reserved for future use

[Ian]

Reserved for future use

[Gen-An]

So MBIL isn't completely extinct, eh?

[Ian]

So MBIL isn't completely extinct, eh?

Well, the brand name isn't.