CD read write drives

[Tim Lamb]

Hitherto, I have used R80 (700mB) discs in my computer disc drive.

The current offering from Viking is for a much higher storage capacity. How do I tell if my fairly ancient drive will handle these discs?

[John Williamson]

The easy way is to try and burn one. Deoending on how old the drive is, it may or may not be able to cope with CD-Rs up to 800Mb, but you may need to get a bit "clever" with the driver configuration. What capacity are the new discs?

[Martin Brown]

There are a few CD makers producing media that are not orange book compatible and probably best avoided unless you like living dangerously.

See:

Under 90 & 99min disks. Or for a review and hints on how to:

I'd be more inclined to worry about the compatibility of old CD writers with some of the modern dyes. I have seen a few that make toasters.

DVDs are even more tetchy about writing and write speeds.

[Tim Lamb]

Ah! Slight intelligence gap.

I searched for CD discs on the Viking site and their only offering was the DVD+RW at 4.7GB.

I guess this is a different animal?

[Tim Lamb]

On checking they were DVDs!

I see they have the usual CDs in their paper catalogue so probably just my finger trouble:-)

>

[John Williamson]

Just slightly. They use a red laser, not an IR one, for a start... :-)

[Martin Brown]

Quickest way is go into device manager and post the DVD/CD ROM model ident string for the drive or search online to get its capabilities.

Try Amazon they probably have better prices and a wider range of decent brands. Specialist DVD/CD media sellers have an even wider range.

Completely - they are DVDs and you can get them in + and - flavours and with different dye technologies any one of which can be a cause of difficulties in writing media that will read reliably on any machine.

Finding one that works with your kit and sticking to it is not a bad idea. Choice of media is even more critical if you originate content and don't want to be mithered by people who can't read your disks.

These days Bluray are the highest capacity storage media available.

[Bob Eager]

Yes...try SVP (.co.uk)

[fred]

Haven't used them since the original guy in Plymouth sold up and the buyers (in Dundee) sold my email address for spam. When the address was svp@ it was a bit of a give away.

These days I search Amazon for deals and generally use Datawrite Titanium in the -R variant (CD-R/DVD-R) without problems.