August 2006

VSO-Software presents second report about burners and media use.

In April 2005, we have slowly introduced a new feature to collect anonymous data about the burning process. These statistics are collected in a MySQL database and we used this database to focus our attention on some optical drives. The database contains information like drive model, firmware, media type and brand, burn speed and whether the burn has completed successfully or not. As of today the database contains more than 14 million records, collected by VSO products such as CopyToDVD, BlindWrite, PhotoDVD and ConvertXtoDVD ( formerly known as DivxToDVD ) but also by some 3rd party products which use VSO technology (Burning SDK). If you wonder why you should switch on the statistic option during installation, please read this.
We published a first analysis in December 2005 and are now releasing the second, updated report .
 What are the most popular CD and DVD writer manufacturers ? What is the best DVD format to use (+R or -R) ? Is it that important to update the firmware? Have the last trends changed since December 2005 ?

With 50 000 new records per day we can quickly analyse the behaviour of a new drive and detect compatibility issues. We use this database for support, suggesting the best drive or the best media brand for customers.
The average burning  success rate has reached  95%, increasing by 2.5 % since December O5.. Some people may consider it not very high, but the behaviour of customers leads to believe they try several times in case the burn fails, and before realizing it is an issue of poor media quality, or another reason, the success rate is lowered. As we will see later, the best drive combined with the best media can increase the success rate up to 97%.

It's interesting to see that there are more than 1900 different drive models, and 900 different media brands and types.
As we will see later, the top 5 drive manufacturers represent more than 80% of the market.

Chapter 1 - What is the most popular media format?

CD vs. DVD : It's not a big surprise, the DVD format is getting more and more popular. In December 2005, we found out that 80% of users were burning on DVD. Today, we see that the trend has increased to 90%. This is also due to the fact that most VSO and affiliate products do not offer the option to burn on CD  At this time only BlindWrite and CopyToDVD are still used to produce CD copies.

DVD = 90%
CD = 10% of total burns

Now let's look at the use of different DVD formats. They are divided into 3 categories , + ,  – (R and RW) and DL media.



DVD format graph

DVD format details [sorted by uses]

They are divided into 4 big categories, the R (writable one time only), the RW (writable several times), RAM media and the Double Layer (capacity of 9 GB, like commercial DVD movies) which is available for both + and - formats now.
R format (+/-) is used 91.3% of the time while RW amounts to 8,7% . The  DL format , despite being heavily promoted by drive and media manufacturers, represents only 1.1% of the total burns.
RAM is not popular with VSO products as it only accounts for 0.05 %!

For those who wonder which is the best format between + and - , here is what our survey unveils: the – format is more popular, while + is a little bit more reliable with a 95,2 % success rate.

For the RW format, the + is also the best choice as far as reliability is concerned.  The Double Layer formats are still not very popular and you can see the overall failure rate is higher than for single layer. This is due to a lot of compatibility issues, media quality and complex technology.

Chapter 2 - Hardware manufacturers

Here is the list of the top used brands, sorted by uses :

As you can see the popularity decreases quickly after the top 5. We will focus our attention on BenQ later, despite its 11th place.
LG is leading, followed by NEC, then Pioneer and Lite-ON. If we combine HP/SONY/Lite-ON (because Lite-ON is producing for Sony and HP) we could re-sort the chart. Plextor, which is well known in the community, is only at the 9th place probably because they are not as active in OEM bundling as their competitors. We almost had the same top tendencies, in December 2005.
If any unmentioned manufacturer wants to collaborate to use this database or help VSO to provide better support, they may contact us (see contact section).
According to our report, the top 4 manufacturers account for more than 50% of the burns.

Chapter 3 – Popular drives analysis

Using the database we will focus now on some important drives. We selected them either by their popularity or their quality.
Here is the chart of the top 20 drives sorted by usage, with the successful completion rate in the right column.

It's no surprise to see LG leading the chart with a very popular drive (even if it's not their most recent model). NEC and LG place several drives in the chart, while the most used (and not the best quality one) SONY drive is only at the 14th position.

The average success rate in the database is 95%, so this lets you figure out what is a good or a bad drive. When the drive is over this value, it means the overall performance (regardless of the media) is quite good. When the success rate is around 90% or below, you can seriously consider the drive to be very sensitive about media used or the drive itself is not very good.
On the quality point of view, LG and NEC (for the most recent drives such as 25xx, 35xx, and 45xx models) the results are very good. Plextor and its popular PX-716 is also in a good position. Samsung, Pioneer and Sony are not impressing.
If we don't take into account  the popularity of a drive (some drives are too recent and can't be in the top positions with a database running for more than 6 months). Please consider also these drives:

Plextor PX-740 : 97,5%
Toshiba R5112 : 96,8%
BenQ 1640 : 97,4%

Chapter 4 – Media manufacturers

Here is the list of the top used media brands, sorted by number of uses :

The figures clearly show that 5 manufacturers (CMC, MCC, Ritek? NU and Tayio Yuden) are leading the market . After the 5th place, the number of burns decreases by half, which means that other manufacturers  really do represent a small share in the market. .
For each manufacturer, the success ratio has been obtained by working out the average ratio for all the types of media of this brand
Here is a list of the top 3 manufacturers and their most successful medias :
CMC: CMC MAG-E01-00 (95.08% success rate); CMC MAG-M01-00 (95.51 %).
MCC: MCC-004-00 (96.35 %) or the MCC 03RG20 (95.54 %) model.
MBI (also known as Imation) :MBIPG101-R04-01 (96.17 %) or MBIPG101-R05-01 (96.06 %).

Here are some trends about drives and media compatibilities :

CMC, RITEK and PRINCO are leading the chart. The most reliable media are the RITEK-R03-02 and the MCC-004-00, which are respectably at the 6th and the 8th place. MCC is better known as VERBATIM and Mitsubishi brand name.

Like in the “Popular drives analysis” (Chapter 4), the success ratio reaches 95 % , which enables you to figure out which is a “good” or “”bad” media.  You can also notice that the TTG02 and the FUJIFILM03 are not very impressive, maybe because TTG02 is a well-known pirated media ID.

How to know if you have  good or bad drive and media?

We implemented a feature in VSO Inspector, our free diagnostic and reporting tool, with which you can request the average success rate for the inserted media, and the success rate in the drive you are using.
1) Download VSO-Inspector from our download section
2) Select the drive to diagnose from the top combo (NEC 4550 in our example)
3) Select the Media tab
4) Insert a blank media (a Ritek05 DVD-R in our example) and wait for the media to be recognized
5) Press the Query Database button (be patient our server is overloaded, so it can take some time).
You will see
#1 the success rate (94.1%) and the number of reports for the media inserted
#2 the success rate (99%) and the number of reports (509 samples here) for the media burnt with a NEC 4550.

Chapter 6 – Conclusion and VSO Awards

VSO Drive Manufacturor AWARD : NEC

Congratulations to the drive manufacturer NEC. We have seen in the analysis that the brand was in the 2nd place in the hardware manufacturer trends, we appreciate the reliability the flexibility to add unofficial firmware and the overall efforts in the production of the latest models.

VSO Media Manufacturor AWARD : MCC/Verbatim

Congratulations to the media manufacturer VERBATIM ( aka Mitsubitshi aka MCC ) because of the popularity of the media ( 2nd place ) combined to the success rate and innovation ( Verbatim is the first manufacturer to have release double layer media )


To be continued
If you want to publish or obtain a special study, please contact us by email: info (at) vso-software.fr