What burning speed is suggested?
 

from e-mail...

Part of this is actually answered on the "Advanced Concepts" guide on the site: http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/advancedconcepts.htm

In general, in the year 2009 (and for the part couple of years, actually), it's been suggested to burn at, or just under the "rated" speed of the media.

On your typical 16x discs, you'll get the best results from burning at the 4x-12x speed range. Too fast is just as bad as too slow, so 1x and 2x may be just as bad as "full blast" 16x burning. Burning beyond the rating of the media, such as 18x-22x is not suggested. Overspeed burning has NEVER been suggested, since the early days of when people tried to burn 1x media at 2x speeds.

This topic can get really picky, and it does get affected by the drive in use (more so, in fact, when dealing with DVD+R DL media burn speeds).

This information, of course, mostly affects computer-burned media. Discs burned in DVD recorders (set-top machines that have replaced VCRs) are burned with a different method, it's realtime, below 1x speed. These burns tend to be fine, but it all comes down to the burner inside the recorder, and the quality of media being used.

Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden 16x media work best in the 4x-12x range. Remember that 6x is the fastest "continous" speed allowed by a drive (not all drives have this speed, either), and 8x and faster are "zonal" burning, where speed ramping is used either in a stair-stepped zone system (Z-CLV), or as a gradual increase of speed (PCAV).

Remember the speed differences (when burning a full disc):
1x = 55 min
2x = 30 min
2.4x = 20-25 min
4x = 15 min
6x = 10 min
8x = 7-8 min
12x = 6-7 min
16x = 5-6 min
18x+ = ~5 min

High speed burning has a high risk of data fail (bad burns), but you only pick up seconds at most, under a minute, once you starts to surpass the 8x speed range.

Thanks
 

for the speedy reply, and the link to all that useful info.

After reading through it, it seems to me that the best strategy for getting reliable burns is to use a burner and media that are rated for 8x or faster, and do the burn at 6x. That avoids the fancy writing strategies that are used to get faster burns, and should act like a speeded-up version of the "old-fashioned" method of burning at 1x with the same speeds and timing used for playback.

Interestingly, I tried an experiment with letting k3b pick the writing speed on the TYG02 media and Sony DRU-V200A (rated at 20x) I just bought. It chose 12x, and I didn't see the zone transitions described on the page you linked to. Could it be that the Sony is capable of doing the simple strategy at the faster speed?

Thanks again,

Ran

p.s. There's an annoying bug in vBulletin (I've seen the same thing on the Ubuntu forums site): if you take too long to write a posting, it times out and logs you out. But, if you follow the instructions for recovering, it logs you out again. :mad: Please check your "session timeout" setting, and see whether the authors have come up with a fix.

I would actually suggest 8x, in general, for most 16x media.

It's a fast enough speed to not be time-consuming, but it's slow enough to bypass potential data speed issues inside a computer (due to same-channel wiring, inferior IDE drivers, slow drives, lots of tiny files, etcs).

Not all media will show zonal rings. It depends on the burner, the media, the exact speed, and maybe even the temperature of the discs and drive. Remember that the color change is largely a thermo-chemical reaction of sorts. I forget the details on how and why that happens, it's been years since I read on the topic, from an authoritative source (one of the manufacturers).

Certain burning programs, I think ImgBurn is one of them, can show you the speed as it slowly increases. I use several different burning programs (Prassi ONES, Nero 6, RecordNow Max 4.5, ImgBurn, DVD Decrypter), so I forget which exact program is the one that shows the speed changes. I'll look more closely, and report back, when I notice which software does it. What I can tell you is that constant speeds above 6x really is not possible, or at very least it isn't done.

I've actually not run into a vB session timeout issue, but I'll look into it. I'm using Firefox 3, and sometimes these things are more browser-related.

Okay, I've increased session timeout from 15 minutes to 60 minutes. That should reduce forced logout, even for the most careful of writers (or long-winded ones, whichever is the case).