Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)These are not real HP disks; my disk burner program says they're made by CMC Magnetics, which makes consumer grade media which I've found can't be trusted to hold your data for more than a few years. I've used a few HP disks and so far haven't had any problems; but in reading many of the reviews here I can see that many other peoplehaven't been so lucky. My Memorex and Ritek disks are showing a high failure rate after 3-5 years also. This makes them useless for me unless I need to get the cheapest, most economical media, and for my important photos and data or whatever, I would prefer to spend a little more money and know my files are safe. The Verbatims, though, have been okay and also the TDKs.
I would just go with Taiyo Yuden. If you look at the cdfreaks and other forums on the web where optical media is discussed, their name comes up again and again for great quality and reliability. The other possibility if you can find it is true Japanese made Verbatim. But the problem with Verbatim now is that they've licensed their technology to various offshore manufacturers who are making the disks under Verbatim's name, and many people feel their quality has slipped. One point in their favor, though, is that their metal-stabilized azo dye is said to be even more stable than Taiyo Yuden's super-cyanine dye, and is said to be more resistant to ultraviolet light.But unless you're in the habit of leaving your DVDs on the dashboard of your car (it's said that can kill your data in a week) this shouldn't be a problem, since most people are going to store their DVDs or CDs in a DVD case or CD wallet away from the sun.
A couple of other possibilities for quality media are Mitsui's dual gold/silver disks, although they're quite expensive--over 2 bucks per disk. Also Mitsubishi and Kodak have teamed up to produce a dual gold/silver disk too, which they call the "century disk." This one has the extra advantage of being guaranteed to be from runs of less than 25,000. The problem is that disk media are pressed from a glass master which typically isn't replaced until 500,000 presses. After a few hundred thousand cycles, though, the disk isn't that accurate and this probably accounts for why people encounter occasional failed burns, since the makers mix disks together from different parts of the total run.
Although expensive, I tried a pack of these recently and they performed very well. But the real test will be in 3-5 years when I check them again and see how well they're holding up. The best way to go is to use disks from at least two quality makers with different technologies and to store one copy off-site. It's unlikely that both would have the same problems. This is what I do and hopefully it will work out. Whichever way you decide to go, good luck with your backups and archiving!
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Product Description:
You can stash up to two hours of high-quality video, or enough data to fill seven CDs on each of these 100 4.7GB DVD-R disks.
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