99min CD-R's, my great experience w/Audio & Data

[abbadon]

Wanted to post some feedback on my experience with 99 minutes CD-R's. This site and board has provide me with great info and gave the push I needed to take the plung and try these out, and it's been a vary favorable experience.

The media: 100 pack 99min RiDATA, $52 at PC Club on sale. Info from CDR Media Identifier v1.63:

ATIP: 96m 43s 37f
Disc Manufacturer: Unknown Disc Identification Code
Reflective layer: Dye (Short strategy; e.g. Phthalocyanine)
Media type: CD-Recordable
Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown
nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f / LBA: 359849)

The drive: LG GCC-4120B 12x8x32x8 Combo drive.

The software: Nero Burning Rom 5.5.6.4

The results: Burned an audio cd with 98 minutes 10 seconds. Probably could do more, but have found any combination of albums I wanted on one cd that was longer. The burn gave an error on writing the lead out, but still functions perfectly on my 12 year old AIWA cd player. This cd player was made before cd-r's existed, and computers only had 1x cd-roms. I'm pretty impressed. The cd plays all the way through the entire cd.

Burned a data cd with 919,185,408 bytes, or 876 MB. That's somewhere around 99 1/2 minutes. The burn was flawless, and the lead out was completed without any problems. All data is readable on both the burner and another 5 year old cd-rom drive.

I have burned other audio and data cd's with similar results, though none with more audio or data than those above. As usual, some cd audio players have trouble with the cd's, but these are the same ones that have problems with any cd-r.

All in all I'm very happy, though $52 is still much more than the $20 I could spend on 100 80min cds. The biggest plus is the added amount of data for SVCD's and Divx CD's.

The of the spec's on my system follow, though they shouldn't matter.

MSI K7T266 Pro2R
Athalon XP 1600+ @ 1800+ via 146 FSB
256 CL 2.5 PC2100
160 GB RAID0
Geforce2 Ti @ 250/441
Windows XP