I had a quick look in the archives to find similar posts, but I've evidently missed any - so... About a year ago, a mate said the Hi-Space CDRs he'd made the previous year were starting to click and pop. I took no notice 'til last week, when one particular (2 year old) CDR I'd last played a month ago (with no ill effects) sounded choppy and fuzzy towards the end of the disc. A few days later, the ill effects had worked their way back a couple more tracks. I'd had this happen before with the black Hi-Space CDRs, though only when I'd overburned them. A black CD I made about a year ago (78 mins) also crapped out on the last 3 tracks lately. I used EACD to try to recover one of the songs from the first corrupted CD, but I abandoned it after the lapse timer showed a further 23 hours' error correcting for a 3 minute track. I'm both puzzled and disappointed - I handle discs strictly by the edges (and carefully) so I know I haven't damaged them. Does anyone know the particular problem I'm referring to? Are the CDs in question simply deteriorating - is there a reason for these sudden, escalating tracking errors? I have 6 CD and/or DVD drives between 2 machines, as well as 4 stand-alone CD units and/or DVD players. The problems are repeated in all of them, if the discs track at all.
1. When you say Hi-Space do you mean Hi-Speed? Or do you mean the 800MB and 900MB CDRs? 2. What speed did you burn those cds at? The faster you burn the more likely you will encounter errors. 3. WHat is the manufacturer of those cds? You can find out by reading the ATIP on them. ===== CDRIdentifier allows you to read the ATIP on a blank cdr(w) (ATIP is essentially a code embedded into a CDR(W) that allows you to identify what company actually manufacturered the disc (as opposed to what company marketed it). For more info visit http://www.cd-rw.org/software/cdr_software/cdr_tools/cdridentifier.cfm or http://www.gum.de/cdrid/
The Brand name is Hi-Space, but the manufacturer is Computer Support Italy, according to the program you recommended. The CDs are 650 (normal disc) and 700 megs (black disc). Neither were overburned. They were both written at 6x speed on my old Yamaha CRW6416s.
Just found this post elsewhere on the forum (thread is "Brand: Hi-Space"). These are the black CD-Rs I'm referring to (should have been more specific) but I can answer the question posed at the end - these discs corrupt quickly and for no apparent reason, over the space of around a year and a few months. I won't be buying them again, but I'd still like to know what the problem is. It can't be down to bad manufacturing - there must be something MPO (or whoever) are overlooking. So far, I've only had this problem with Hi-Space discs and there must be others with similar stories. "I tested the above Carbon vs Gold HiSpace CDR (MPO atip) with CDSpeed. I used two data CD ROMs mode 2 (form 1 of course). Burned with a Yamaha CRW3200 EWK at 16x in DAO. Tested on Memorex DVDmaxx1648. Carbon : starts at full speed. First burst at minute 56 : a peak of 300, then 450 at 60 minutes, then 600 at 67 minutesn then the memorex spinned down a little. Total 4464 errors, average 33x. Carbon burned at 24x : From the noise, I can tell that the Memorex doesn't spin at full speed, therefore the test is not relevant. I tried twice. Yesterday, previous tests showed the same : errors since 60 minutes on a Carbon CD, no errors on a 24x gold CD. Conclusion, now, with these drives, HiSpace Gold CDs have less errors than HiSpace Carbon CDs. The question about which ones will last longer remains unanswered until several years, of course ;"