How reliable is CD-RW really??

[KennyR]

I used to think 100% reliable - what I put on the disc, I got back off byte for byte. But lately that confidence has been damaged.

I was burning a CD-RW with a large (637MB) linux image for a Mandrake install with MakeCD, but mandrake was failing to install, complaining that the image on the CD failed a checksum. I checked it manually, and sure enough, it did. So I reburnt it.

I've burned this same image on several different CD-RW of different brands on at least two different drives, and always the file fails its checksum. Doing a direct compare to the file I still have on HD, often more than 310,000 bytes are wrong - about 0.06% of the full image. There are single byte errors and even whole areas of the file filled with 0 or by repeating bytes like 0x59595959...

It's not the drive or the computer or MakeCD, because I get the same problem on my family PC's burner. The original file I downloaded is fine and unpacks. If it's the discs then I have two bad brands with a full load of defectives. Whatever I do I can't get this file to write properly on a CD-RW.

Does anyone else get this? 0.06% might fall within some kind of quality control, but i need 0.0% error. Are CD-RW discs really so unreliable?

[KennyR]

I know the perils of crappy discs. I got 10 Memorex cdrw and they weren't even detected on my drive - I had to format them on my family computer at least once first to get them to be recognised. Then some of them wouldn't re-format at all, and are just dead coasters. I paid a lot of money for that crap. Grr! :pissed:

But a second pack of Samsung seemed to work a treat, with no problems whatsoever. I've been using them for backup and VCD. But with the worry about the integrity of the data on them, I may go to restore a backup one day and end up with trashed files. :-x

Oh well, at least cdr has always been faithful. Oh, and by the way, it's only really crap cdr that don't last very long. I have it on good authority that normal ones are still working after 5 years or more...

[KennyR]

So the basic consensus of opinion is: "CD-RW are crap, don't use them"?

I hear this a lot, and I'm starting to think that way myself, despite their advantages. Does anyone have anything to say that's more flattering to CD-RW, or are they really crap?

@Gerbinist

No, I'm afraid burning at lower speeds didn't help. It may be the reading of the cdrw that's going wrong, not the writing.