CDR Manufacturers - Why is so much media bad?

I have searched for good media and tried many kinds for years. I guess I'll try to summarize my findings and conclusions.

Dye is irrelevant, dye of any color can be good or bad, it more likely depends on the manufacturer.

Speaking of manufacturers, the name at the top of the disc means nothing. For example, Memorex along with any other 'brand' is actually always made by another manufaturer including CMC Magnetics, Prodisc and sometimes Taiyo Yuden and other companies.

The quality of the media from a single manufacturer can also vary for whatever reason. Some batches tend to be good and some tend to be bad.

What does this all mean? If you don't pick the write disc, you will have problems playing it or your data may become corrupt after a short period of time.

What can you do to prevent it? Test small packages of discs at first and use a program such as Nero DVD Speed to do a surface scan, generally all green is a good result and that is what you are looking for.

There is also another factor that no other website discusses. The physical factor. CDRs are by nature very weak, as you can guess the bottom scratches easier, but that is not the worst part. Many CDRs have no top protective layer or a weak/thin one, the silver/silver discs are especially notorious for flaking off or damaging easily. This is a huge problem, because even if you find a good CDR with good results, if the top is damaged or flakes you will have playback problems or more likely, you will have lost more than 50% of the data on the disc.

Why does this happen? Because the top layer of the disc is also the reflective layer, and the reflective layer is required to read data off the disc. If that layer is damaged and any part of the reflective layer has holes it will cause data loss.

All you can do is try to find good quaity CDRs that burn well and also have a good top protective layer. In my opinion all CDRs should meet this requirement but in practice they do not unfortunatelly.

The good news is that DVD media does not suffer from the top layer weakness of CDRs as all DVDR media has a thick layer, in fact there is a single layer of plastic over top of the reflective layer.