CD-R / CD-RW Media Notes

One of the many ways in which CD-R media are unlike other storage media is that different CD-R media work differently in different recorders and players. Often times, the only way to tell if a particular brand of CD-R will work in your drive is to burn something on it, and then try and read the result.

In the course of evaluating our CD recorder -- a Yamaha CRW-4416S -- we tried several different brands of CD-R media. Almost all of the media worked fine at all the speeds tested, though there were some exceptions. This page is meant to informally catalog our results for our own future reference, in the interests of saving time and wasted CD-R's.

Note: It would be appreciated if people would report successful and unsuccessful writes on naice2 to me, if the media and/or speed listed does not agree with the table (or is missing from the table). To get the media info from cdrecord on naice2, you can say "cdrecord dev=0,6,0 -atip". That output can be redirected to a file and mailed to me.

Summary of Results

CD-R Media Test Results
Vendor Model Type Colors Manufacturer Write Results Comments
CD-Recordable Discs
Hewlett Packard CD-R C4437A PCN silver/green #21 Ricoh Company Limited 1a:ok* 4:ok Label doesn't take ink well. *=on CRW6416.
Kodak Digital Science PCN gold/green #9 Kodak Japan Limited 1:ok 2:ok 4:ALL BAD
Maxell CD-R74 CN gold/blue #8 Hitachi Maxell, Ltd. 2:ok 4:ok
Memorex CD-R CN gold/bluegreen #25 Taiyo Yuden Company Limited 4:ok
Sony CDQ-74CN CN silver/blue #26 TDK Corporation 4:ok
Sony CDQ-74CN CN silver/bluegreen #25 Taiyo Yuden Company Limited [test pending]
TDK CD-R74 CN silver/blue #26 TDK Corporation 4:ok
Verbatim DataLifePlus CD-R CN silver/blue #11 Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation 1a:ok* *=on CRW6416.
(unknown) (unknown) CN gold/green #3 CMC Magnetics Corporation 2:ok 4:ok Sold at our local Fry's. No upper coating.
CD-ReWritable Discs
Memorex CD-RW PC grey/grey #18 Plasmon Data systems Ltd. 2:ok Speed 2 only.
Verbatim CD-RW PC grey/grey #11 Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation 4:ok

Description of Fields

Vendor:
The company that packaged and sold the disc. Generally printed all over the wrapper, jewel case insert, and sometimes on the disc. Examples are "Sony" and "Kodak".
Model:
The model number that the vendor sold the product under. Some model numbers are specific-sounding, like "CD-R74", while others seem pretty generic, like "CD-RW".
Type:
Here, the ATIP disk type as reported by cdrecord is abbreviated:
Colors:
The color of the media as view from the "top" (the label side), followed by the "bottom" (the data side). This is pretty subjective and imprecise.
Manufacturer:
This is the manufacturer index and name as reported by cdrecord.
Write Results:
This is a list of the write speeds tested, followed by the results. Any omitted speeds were not tested. An "a" suffix on a speed indicates that CD-audio was written instead of data.
Comments:
Miscellaneous comments.

Note: Some tests were also performed on a Yamaha CRW-6416S, the 4416S's big brother. Results from those tests are included where none are available for the 4416S, and are marked as such.

Last modified: Fri Oct 1 13:30:36 PDT 1999