BD-R's - can you trust them?

I have some compelling evidence that some of them just cannot be trusted ...

October, 2010


Introduction

Most of this information comes from my own experience and reasearch and has been posted online over at cdfreaks, now known as myce. The thread itself is here, and has received over 8300 views. My username there is lui_gough and I have been a relatively "senior" member of cdfreaks, having participated in many media tests and firmware tests including beta testing for ala42's MCSE - see the changelog where you'll find my username.

Now that Bluray blanks have hit a low patch ($2.50), and burners are affordable ($150), I can see many more users jumping on the Bluray bandwagon - whether that be to copy their movies, author some home movies in high definition or even as a backup medium. I had the same idea back in mid-2008 when burners were $450 and media was $20 a disc! (And to think that I bought two burners back then!)

But alas, as with any relatively-new technology, there are problems. I have two LG GGW-H20L Supermultiblue 6x recorders, and firmware YL02 and YL03 was available. I sourced a batch of 16 RITEK 2x BD-R's as a backup media for large system images. It was the only affordable media around - and people were recommending it at the time. Unfortunately, this is one of the big mistakes in my whole Bluray venture.

What happened?

Most of us will burn a disc, and possibly just throw it in a corner and never look at it again till it's needed. I was more wary of Bluray than to do this. Every burn was verified twice after completion - just to make sure it was functional. Then it was stored sensibly, in my relatively-temperature-controlled room at low humidity in a dark box. That keeps almost all the enemies of recordable discs (i.e. light, heat and humidity) at bay.

Every 6 months or so, I would lug out the collection and sample them. Maybe 5 discs of the 15 will go through a scandisc verification on the CD-Speed software. If they pass, the whole batch is assumed good. A reasonable strategy to monitor the progress of the discs, I thought.

Then, just one and a half years after burning - all five sampled discs were unreadable. I thought they had all gone - I immediately sent news out to the world that there might be something wrong with these discs - hence the overzealous title of the thread linked above. In actuality, about half of them were dead. I posted scan images to the internet and recovered as much as I could. No-matter what I did, swapping drives, choosing other drives made no difference. The data had already gone ... there must have been some subtle chemical or structural changes in the discs which rendered the data unreadable.

After sending news, there were quite a few skeptics, with many citing other people who had used many of those discs without problem. They, however, owned their discs for a third of the time that I owned them. One very unlucky fellow came up - he had lost practically all his discs - and his discs were younger than mine as well. But there were two common factors - we both burnt Ritek discs, and we both had LG burners of some description.

When there are multiple common factors like this - it's hard to point the finger at one party solely. I was more diplomatic, suggesting that it could be the combination of the burner and discs that causes the problems - it is known that the different burners produce different quality burns. In fact, a lot of my time at cdfreaks was spent playing around with the burn strategies in DVD writer firmware to optimize burn quality and speed - so I'm well aware of the interaction between discs and their burners. Unfortunately, we didn't have much more information at our disposal - and others just went with their gut feeling and decided it was too risky (and rightly so!) and went to other brands.

I hoped for some more information and some resolution to this case - so I awaited more data. But being an early pioneer, there weren't others with discs of comparable age to be able to draw any conclusions. I was also furious - my investment in these discs and my data were lost forever. I fired off some e-mails to Ritek only to be greeted by "low level" customer support, who gave unhelpful advice and essentially refused to acknowledge they have a problem. It was only after further digging that the truth started becoming apparent ...

Graphs

Here are the scans of the disc. The first scans are the scans of the disc when they were 1.5 years old. The second scans are the scans of the disc when they got to 2 years of age - note the continued degradation of the survivor discs. Inbetween, there are transfer-rate-test graphs, which plot the read speed of the disc versus the position on the disc - a good disc should show a smooth curve without errors. The 2 year scan wasn't performed for the dead discs - there was no point. Discs with severe errors at the beginning had their scans terminated early as it took a long time to scan.

1.5 Year Scan Transfer Rate Test 2 Year Scan
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Okay, so due to some sloppiness on my part, one disc missed out on a TRT when it shouldn't have. But the results seem to speak for themselves - the 16 discs at the beginning are in varying states of health after 1.5 years of storage. Some are entirely dead (towards the bottom) and the better ones toward the top. After an extra half a year in storage, some of the discs with a few yellow blocks lose them and turn green (likely dust interfering with the readout), others with yellow blocks grow them, and they turn read, but at least four discs die in that half a year. Not very encouraging. But the graphs speak for themselves - as time passes, the discs appear to get worse and worse.

While so far, all of these discs have been Ritek, it's encouraging to report that the other discs in my collection (younger) which comprises of discs from MEI, Verbatim, CMC and TDK seem to be doing okay and haven't yet degraded into data loss. But that's not to say that they won't in the near future - for the CMC's and TDK's - there are physical signs of rot (oxidation of the reflective layer due to poor sealing) as can be seen in the following photos which suggests the data is at threat:



The first one is a 2x TDK BD-R, the second is a 2x TDK BD-RE and the third is a CMCMAGBA3 BD-R 4x disc under Shintaro (poor) brand. Your data is definitely not as safe as you might have thought ...

Further Research

Only after posting this and receiving mixed results did I seek to see if more people have been affected - and surely enough, they have. The problem - all this experience hasn't ever been gathered together to give you a true insight into just how widespread this problem is - especially on the Ritek front.

Isolated murmerings in the forum at myce, not taken seriously, and murmerings over at another forum suggest that there might be a real problem. However, the most criticisms came from Amazon - which resells Ritek BD-R but rebranded under distribution names such as Ridata, Traxdata, Maxell, etc. Here are the notable reviews:

Edit: I'm sorry to inform you all that none of my Traxdata discs read after about 1 year since I wrote them!!! I apologise for misleading rating, but I also learnt the hard way about these. They are not readable on PS3 fat or slim and not on my pc drive LG GGW-H20L. Recovery programs can hardly read any data from them. Spend more money on TDK or Verbatim if you care about your data.

Discs burnt lovely, played well, but after just a few playings become corrupted. Disappointed - an expensive waste of money and messed up an important filme premmiere for us :-(

i bought about 300 euros of those bd-r 25gb from 10 in a cake each , so about over 70 of them . anyway. burned them with all different software. they were burned as data for mkv video files . with the lg ggw-h20l. after burned , i check them visually and they were okay. later on from a year ago , to today, they were either unreadable or corrupted . never had that with dvds and i burned over thousand of them . still working today . contacted traxdata . same . no replies. my understanding it is a made by riteck and the reputation for thos as well as for dvds is stay away from them . i can't believe this huge scam they played on customers. total defect on bd-r. i used nero discspeed 5 to check the last remaining traxdata and so far. it looks like all of them are corrupted. tried to visually play them and they would freeze or go back to the beginning . show yellow or red dots for errors . very bad. stay away from those and hope this factory go out of business soon ps: the reason i bought so many , is at the beginning , they were okay, all inspected visually and check for errors with the software . very treacherous . never thought they could turn bad later

I bought over 100 of these discs at the beginning of last year and found only a about 9 wouldn't write in my LG writer, but would in my Sony. But having gone back to the discs a few months later found that many of them are now unreadable (around 43 at last count). I'd steer clear of this brand as they seem to have a very high failure rate and are just a waste of money. I've since switched to another brand (Pidata)and have had no issues with the new ones at all, every disc has written perfectly in both my writers and so far 1 year down the line all the new brand discs still play back fine whereas the Traxdata discs just keep getting worse and worse.

Started buying these in Jan 2009 when they were $79.00 / 15pk. I made 30 disks at that time. No coasters. They seemed to work great. I always burn at a slower than the rated speed & I do a verify afterwards. I needed to get data off of one of the disks in December 2009. I found all the disks burned in January were completely unreadable. One disk that was made in Feb was partially readable using recovery tools. I made 2 disks in March that were fully readable. Altogether I lost 27 Blu-ray data disks that cost me over $150.00. I bought Memorex because I trusted the brand name. Some manager at Memorex figured out how to cut costs on these disks and I'm sure he got a large bonus for improving profits. To the management at Memorex - may the fleas of a thousand stag deer infest your armpits.

I had the same experience as the other person -- I have burned six of these BD-R discs, some as recently as November 2009, and now none of those discs will play. I have tried them in several Blu-ray players, as well as the LG burner that created them, and they pretty much behave like a blank disc. This is disappointing, to say the least! Hopefully it was just a bad batch -- I bought them in May of 2009. I have some Panasonic BD-Rs that I burned several years ago, and those still play fine.

I've bought 75 discs of these puppies and burnt 'em all. After 6 month they all became unreadable. I bought these when they were going for $90+ for 15. So I guess I'm out $450+ bucks. Memorex's comment is they they only get the highest reviews for their discs and I must be doing somthing wrong. Yeah right! Stay away from these bad buys.

You know, one would imagine that once you burn successfully a video production using one of these babies (Memorex BD-R, 1-4x, 25GB) you would expect them to last a lifetime. Unfortunately that is not the case. I burned a High Definition production about 8 months ago, watched the disk 4-5 times, have kept the surface immaculately clean, only to find out I have lost all the work; this happened to 2 of my disks. At first I thought that the Blue-ray DVD drive had gone bad, but tested them in 3 other players, updated my Sony BDP-S550 firmware, and have not been able to read the DVD disks again.

5-10 people making the same complaint can't be wrong. I never write reviews, but this stuff angers me so much that I must. First of all, pay attention to what your media really is. Memorex, Maxell, these are just rebrands of Ritek media. Ritek has always been garbage, but at the time I purchased these, they were the only affordable brand on the market. They usually burn fine, and work, at first. But after some time passes, none of them are readable anymore. I will never buy ANYthing Memorex, Maxell, or Ritek EVER again. Go with Verbatims instead, or maybe even Panasonic like others have said. But do yourself a favor and check the media code. If it says Ritek, return it immediately.

I could give this crap 0 start if were possible; I lost my back up data in less than 2 months. This blank media is useless, it make no sense to throw your money down the toiled. I recommend ether TDK, Sony or Panasonic.

Resides the price I do not see any reason to buy this "Bad Quality" Blu-rays, if you are planed to storage files, music or photos you probably have success because the PC usually are able to read them for a while, but at the end (1 to 2 years) you will lost all your data, so I will recommend you to buy the new model by Panasonic Panasonic Blu-ray Disc 20 Pack - 25GB 6X BD-R - Printable that will last forever! If we are talking about transfer Movies into this awful Memorex Blu-ray the bad ending will be sooner... you won't be able to see then in you Blu-ray Player after 3 to 5 months, so what it the idea to do all over again?????? For Movie the best ones out there are made by TDK, any of them will last for ever and the choice will be base on the capacity and quantity needed:

Recorded 7 disks in the 6 months period. 3 so far lost data. I have not used them to read/check until now so they look like brand new but data is missing. Do not buy these unless you want to lose your data.

I had the same experience as the other person -- I have burned six of these BD-R discs, some as recently as November 2009, and now none of those discs will play. I have tried them in several Blu-ray players, as well as the LG burner that created them, and they pretty much behave like a blank disc. This is disappointing, to say the least! Hopefully it was just a bad batch -- I bought them in May of 2009. I have some Panasonic BD-Rs that I burned several years ago, and those still play fine.


Apologies for the poor formatting above, they were just copied format-less into this page. Just seeing so many other people comment in a similar fashion, with younger discs than mine proves that there is a problem, especially with Ritek media, so for all of you out there thinking of saving a few bucks on Ritek media - bad move. Keep in mind, Ritek media is beginning to turn up in many unexpected places - including TDK spindles from time to time so WATCH OUT!

I have no ill will against Ritek. It just so happens that I am convinced their product is sub-standard, and they should be called up on that. This isn't the first time that Ritek have had data-loss issues, back in the DVD days, their G05/G06's were known for occasional data loss depending on the particular batch. Regardless, it pays to be vigilant about your media, and choose quality media. Tools like DVD Identifier allow you to read the pre-recorded manufacturer information off the disc so that you have an idea of who really manufactured a disc. Just be aware - sometimes the "best" codes from MCC, MXL, and TYG are "forged" - so any discs from Hong Kong with those codes should set off warning bells.

Good luck with your data and don't forget to backup!