Wizard, is the following an accurate description of the test protocol that should be followed when testing discs to report in this thread and, if so, would it be helpful to include as an instructional guide?
1. Prepare a compilation to burn to the test disc. You should set up your burning software to burn a simple ISO-9660 data CD, in disc-at-once (DAO) mode with finalization selected. Include enough files in your compilation to completely fill the capacity of the disc being tested. Aim for filling the disc to within 1-2 MBytes of its full capacity. It is important to completely fill the disc, because discs are more susceptible to errors at the outer edges, and the outer edges are only written to when the disc is full.
2. Begin testing by selecting the maximum burning speed permitted by the drive for the disc being tested. This speed may be higher than the rated speed of the disc.
3. Burn the disc. Keep track of the actual burn time so that you can correctly ascertain the real burn speed used during the burn. Not all burning software will correctly display the actual speed being used, because some drives silently and automatically adjust their writing speeds according to whatever safe burning mechanism (e.g. Safe-BURN, Optimum Write Speed Control, etc.) they implement. A less preferred alternative is to disable the drive's safe burning mechanism and thus disable the automatic speed adjustment so that you know what you set is what you get. This is less preferred because, in addition to disabling automatic burn speed adjustment, it may disable other burn quality enhancing features of the drive such as power calibration.
4. Test the quality of the burned disc by performing a surface scan of the disc using the ScanDisc test in CD Speed (
www.cdspeed2000.com ). If the drive in which you burned the disc correctly reports C2 errors, test the quality in that same drive. If the drive in which your burned the disc does not correctly report C2 errors, then test the disc in a drive available to you that does report C2 errors and most closely resembles the capabilities of the burner you are testing. If you do not have any drive that reports C2 errors, then you can’t contribute your test results to this thread.
CD Speed will warn you with the following dialog box if the drive you are using to test the disc does not support C2 error reporting:
Also, allow the reader to automatically select its maximum read speed during the surface scan test. Do not artificially limit the reading speed through utilities such as Nero DriveSpeed.
5. If the disc is error-free, report the actual burn speed as described in step 8. Error-free means that ScanDisc reports
no unreadable sectors and
no damaged sectors. The sector map should be 100% green like this:
6. If the disc is not error-free, switch to the next lowest burn speed you can select.
7. Repeat steps 3 through 6 until you either burn an error-free disc or discover that you can't burn an error-free disc at any speed setting.
8. Report your results, including the make, model and firmware version of the drive, the type, brand, speed rating and capacity of the disc, the maximum error-free burn speed actually achieved, and the manufacturer of the disc as reported by CD Speed's CD-R Info function. Optionally report the disc’s ATIP code and the actual burning time. In the example shown below, the manufacturer is Taiyo Yuden, and the ATIP code is 97m24s01f:
When reporting the burn speed, just report the nominal speed. Some burning software such as Nero can be configured with some drives to report the actual instantaneous burn speed as the burn is in progress. While this is useful for verifying that the drive is burning at the speed selected (see step 3), we don't need that level of precision for the final report. For example, if you set the burn speed to 48x, but your burning software tells you that the maximum speed achieved was actually 48.95x, just report the speed as 48x.
cfitz
On the other end of the spectrum, those TDK Silver discs by Ritek can't be too good if you had to knock the speed down to 24X.
