Review on Memorex DVD 4 7GB Hang 32025517 by Hartman Hernandez

The Manufacturer ID/Disc ID returned for these 8x DVD+RWs is RITEK-008-00. That means they were made by Ritek. To me, Ritek was a pretty reliable Tier 2 optical media manufacturer. This is not the typical Memorex quality left to the worst optical disc manufacturer, CMC. I haven't formatted, burned, or tediously tested these drives yet. I only post my results based on Vendor ID. Memorex donates their BD-REs to Ritek, which I have experience with. Aside from the Playstation 3, I liked the Ritek BD-RE discs from Memorex. I've been using it for almost 4 years now and the only problem is that the cheap LiteOn drive stopped writing to it, but only because the drive was junk. As said, the usual quality of Memorex on their CD-R and DVD-R is lower. they are at the mercy of the CMC. Before I was told about the poor quality of CMC, I was spending about $1,000 on media and spare drives when Optodisc switched DVD-R production from its own brand to CMC. As ImgBurn beta testers, we see dozens of issues with CMC media, and when users switch to something like Verbatim DataLife Plus or Taiyo Yuden media, their issues go away. CMC DVD media often fails to complete burning in ImgBurn. Those who pass cannot pass the exam. Of those that pass the test, half are not recognized as playable media by the DVD player. I had the same CMC DVD+R. When I tried something other than the CMC DVD+R, the same content could be played on a DVD player from another manufacturer. So I fully expected these DVDs to be CMCs as well. Memorex sometimes does not use CMC. They use Panasonic, a good optical media manufacturer, for their 24x CD-RWs and Ritek for their BD-Rs and BD-REs. Now that I've had the opportunity to experiment with these drives for a few months, I'll try to edit my review to reflect what I've learned. So for now, remember that my star rating is simply based on the fact that Memorex didn't use CMC for these drives, they used Ritek instead. EDIT: Did my first test and took a star off my rating. They should be rated 8x. ImgBurn says the burn speed is set to 8x, but the max write speed never exceeds 6x. Why pay for 8x media if you can't get 8x? You only get 6x in PIONEER BD-RW BDR-209M Firmware 1.31. EDIT 12/17/2015: I burned another one of those 5 discs and this time I got 8x! Find out. Well it's a coincidence. It happens sometimes. The discs just sometimes end up on a specific media for specific burns. There is no explanation. So I added back the asterisk I subtracted earlier. EDIT 2015-12-19: Did a test to read a disc that was only written at 6x. I burned the disc so that it was about 99% full of DVD-Video. This would mean that the player would have to read data from both the inside and the outside of the disc. A read error can occur in these two places if the writing is not performed correctly. In addition, the need to read the rest of the place performs a thorough reading test. I played this disc on a Playstation 3. I had no playback problems. No pixelation, no skipping, no dropouts, pops or problems, no pauses in the video. Well, these discs seem pretty good to me. EDIT 12/20/2015: I tested the disc I burned at 8x speed. The same criteria as described above were used for a hole that only burned at 6X magnification. Just different content but still 99% disk full. I experienced the same result. No playback problems. So all I really need to test now is the durability of the media. Of course, this cannot be proven. This can only be determined with true real-time results. If I find anything on this I'll try to remember to update this review with that information. But for now I'm happy with these discs. That they are pretty good for my needs. I also wrote a new test on a disc that was previously only recorded at 6x. This time he writes in 8x. So the first burn was just an accident. And it happens sometimes. Drives lock up at lower speeds for a variety of reasons. I had a whole stack of Verbatim 16x DVD-Rs, half of which were 6x locked. When I was halfway through, the write speed approached 16x. So think. EDIT 12/24/2015: I may need to change my rating of these drives. I had several Imation 8x DVD+RW discs with the exact same disc ID as these discs. After less than 5 overwrites, one of my discs failed the ImgBurn test. So I changed my rating of this product from 4 stars to 1. I may have to do the same with this one. EDIT 12/29/2015. qualitative. They still write normally, while the Imations didn't even write before they failed. But this imitation is for you. Imation products have always been of poor quality. Their disks always ran out before the year. They outsource most of their DVD and CD recording to CMC and CMC is the worst producer among them. So they pretty much match the Ricoh/Ritek 8x DVD+RWs I already had. The sad fact is that you simply cannot achieve the advertised number of writes from 8x DVD+RW rewritable media. You get around 20.