Review on TDK Double Layer DVD+R 25-Pack Discs - 8.5GB Data, 8x Recording Speed, 4 Hours Video - Cakebox by Marco Carpenter

I should have written this review a few months ago, but I finally got around to it. In fact, I've always been a staunch supporter of TDK media. I love the clean look and the fact that you can buy both regular and DL and they look the same. One is gray and the other is blue. However, performance has become an important issue. I quickly learned what the term "stand" means. I had about 50% errors on a box of blank DVD media in DL. Single layer media has always worked well. TDK customer support is OUTSTANDING! They were always happy to take my stack of bad DL discs and send me new ones for free. After I swapped out 4 or 5 spindles, TDK started asking more questions and eventually put me in touch with their development lab. What I discovered completely surprised me. I never would have believed it. Most spelling mistakes are NOT the result of bad media! This is because the drive cannot write to the media. At the time I had 4 computers and they all had different DVD drives. One of them was Samsung's new USB DVD drive. TDK informed me that my drive's firmware was most likely NOT up to date and this was causing the write errors. They suggested I get a good quality drive from a reputable OEM. Most laptops including my dear LENOVO had an unnecessary OEM drive installed. When I checked for firmware updates, most of the time there weren't any. Drive manufacturers are quick to release firmware updates for older drives as new drives become available. On the other hand, media manufacturers are constantly changing firmware, and if the drive manufacturer doesn't keep up, guess what they won't write to the media. Why do some media manufacturers have a better reputation? Because media manufacturers play favourites. First they release new firmware for companies like Verbatim. Verbatim has the best chance of repairing your outdated firmware drive. I now have a high quality Memorix DVD drive with the latest firmware. It records 99.9% of the time at the maximum writing speed available. (8x on DL-TDK). I used to be sure I had a bad carrier. Thanks to TDK engineers, I found out that the problem was with my drive, not the media. I hope this review provides some valuable insight as to why one medium seems to be better than another, but it really isn't. Get a new quality DVD drive from a manufacturer that supports your firmware and buy a TDK. They work GREAT! Contacting TDK Support will be happy to provide a list of recommended media. The supported ones were tested in their lab.