Customer Reviews

Ridata 8x 4.7 GB DVD+R Spindle (100 Discs)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I have bought and used Ridata blank DVD's both + and - R many times in the past without problems until recently. As I was looking around for the lowest price I couldn't help but notice how many negative reviews had been given to the discs lately due to coasters from poor manufacturing and wondered if I should try the brand again. The price was right and my past experience was good with this brand so I ordered the discs. When they came in I decided to look through the entire 100 spindle disc by disc to see if any defects were present like many other reviewers were mentioning. Out of my 100 discs 13 of them had defects that were noticeable by looking at the dye on the writing surface. Some had chips missing where you could see through to the label side, some just had freaky looking smudges on the discs, and some were scratched badly. So I got the number for Ritek/Ridata from the customer service of the website I ordered the discs from since the phone number on the Ritek website does not work, and called them about the problem. They told me that they would replace the bad discs if I was willing to send them all using UPS insured shipping (they accept no other method ie: USPS, Fed Ex, etc which would be cheaper), which of course would cost more in shipping than the cost of 13 discs. The employee told me that I should keep them and when I order more to stack them up until I had enough to make it worth sending in. This tells me that Ridata knows they are making poor quality discs and they expect you to get bad ones in every spindle. They could at least stand by their product enough to send out free replacements instead of making YOU pay to ship them back, this is very poor customer service.

The second problem I encountered with these discs is that they will not honor their mail in rebates. My spindle of 100 had a $10 mail in rebate that I filled out and sent in with all the required information the day that I received them. Two months later they send me a letter indicating that they will not honor my rebate request due my not sending in a receipt, purchase date, purchase location, and an invalid postmark date. This is complete BS and all of this was included in my envelope I even took pictures of each one of these things being put inside, and shows what a ripoff this company is. I don't even know what an invalid postmark date is supposed to mean since I sent the rebate form in well within the required time frame. I know that definitely in the future I will never buy discs from Ritek/Ridata again no matter how cheap they seem because they are producing low quality discs and will not honor rebates or replacements. I have never bought a spindle of DVDR's or CDR's by any other company before that had any manufacturing errors per spindle, and I believe that a 13% error rate is unacceptable.

I am on my third spindle of these Ridata DVD+R's. The first two spindles were fantastic and I had ZERO coasters. I ordered the third spindle a few weeks ago and I have thrown away 95% of the discs that I have burned. The burns completed without error, but skipped and pixelated around 3/4 thru the disc.

I haven't changed my software or made any other changes to my computer that would have caused this, and I am running the latest available firmware on my burner. I bought a couple of Maxell DVD+R's to rule out a bad burner and they burned and played fine.

After doing some research online, I learned that Ridata is farming out their production to other companies and that the quality has dropped dramatically. I will not be buying any more of this brand of DVD's and I would no longer recommend them to anyone, either.

I now have 75 blanks that I can't use or return, because I have already removed the bar code and sent it in for the $10.00 rebate. Oh, well... live and learn.

If you want your data to last, avoid anything Ritek like the plague. Both the G04 and G05 Ritek (of all brands, Ridata, Ridisk, etc.) are crap. I have a lot of Ritek G05s that have at least DOUBLE the PIE and/or PIF errors after just 2 weeks after the initial burn. Check out CDFreaks and you'll see the entire Ritek line suffers from some sort of serious data degradation like this--at best, your data burned to the DVD will become unreadable in one year.

Sure, the DVDs might arrive in pristine condition (no scratching to the dye, no dye spotting [indicating poor merchant storage, due to excessive heat or direct sunlight]), but the data stored on them eventually becomes unreadable (meaning it can't be read on a DVD burner nor by a DVD standalone player). Why else do I steer people away from these? Personal experience: I have already reburned 50% of my 100 Ritek Ridata 8x DVD-R (mid Ritek G05), which showed anywhere from 2x-7x the original error rates in anywhere from just 2 weeks to 2 months after the initial burn. I personally burned these with both a Pioneer DVR-108 and Plextor 716a, and it is NOT a burner nor firmware issue; it is a POOR MEDIA issue. Also notice there is NO WARRANTY for Riteks to be replaced when they fail! That is the biggest nail in the coffin against it, because if a Ritek fails, you've lost your data AND your money--with no recourse!!! This means I've lost $45, plus all the extra time to rescan DVDs going bad and reburning the worst ones.

If you want peace of mind, the only tested reliable brands to buy are either Taiyo Yuden (mids: yuden000t02-00; tyg02, tyg03) or Verbatim (MCC003, MCC004), which have held up over time and consistently have the lowest error rates. You might also do ok with mid MBIP (Moser Baer India), which seem to burn with low error rates initially (when tested on BenQ1640, Plextor 716a and Liteons), but their longevity on data preservation has not yet been determined.

Moral of the story? Do some reading on good media choices at [...]and DO NOT BUY ANYTHING RITEK!!! You'll only end up losing that money PLUS you'll have to re-burn everything and SPEND MORE MONEY on good, proven media. Avoid Ritek like the plague it is, if you want to preserve your burned data for years to come.

I have previously used over 300 Ridata 4x media and have always had good success but the 100-pk of these 8x DVD's are terrible. DVD's recorded with Nero (ver 6.3 or 6.6) using 2 different computers produces DVD's that will not play all the way to the end without skipping and freezing around the last 1/4 area of the DVD. Nero reported no errors when doing a validation but on my 2 different stand-alone DVD players, they have trouble playing them all the way to the end. I've tried 2.4x 4x and 8x record speeds but still bad when playing back.

I ran Nero CD-DVD Speed and Kprobe tests on these troublesome recorded DVD's and they show a lot of errors in the 2nd half of the DVD's. I also have some newly purchased Ridata 8x media with white injet printable tops that are also just as terrible. I have purchased a few other brands (Sony and Memorex) after this episode and they record and play fine. What has happened to Ridata???

I purchased both the DVD+R and the DVD-R types of the Ridata DVDs. In both cases, I have experienced about a 33%+ defective rate. My prior batch of Ritek and Memorex was closed to 3% to 5%.

The first set of 100 - the coating material for the writing surface caused the discs to stick to one another. I wonder if the coating caused the high defect rate.

I then opened up the second batch and found the discs to not stick to one another. The defect rate is lower at about 1 out of every 5.

I bought these discs based on the price to value. I would not recommend this brand to you.

I also have the Plextor DVD burner and So far all my Ridata discs have burned perfectly! (over 20 so far)
These DVD's are much better than the first one's I bought at Amazon (Memorex 4x), I had a lot of coasters with those!!!

I had many failures with burns using this media. I will not be purchasing more of this brand - the price is cheap, but the per-unit cost once you factor out failures is quite high.

I am just about through a 100 disk spindle of these using a NEC 3250A drive. Unfortunately, I had already burned a great many of them before discovering that they just did not make it. When the drive finally burns at a true 8x (about the last 1/4), things just fall apart. No actual errors, but on playback all the problems show up, massive pixelation, pauses, skips. The only way to use these, for me, is to burn them at 6x. Might as well have saved some money and bought the 4x ones.

I found nothing but rather rave reviews on Newegg regarding these, but you look around everywhere else and people have much the same problem... they are unreliable at 8x speed. I also found out why the reviews on Newegg are good... they kick out the bad reviews... mine was rejected for no real reason other than it was negative.

So, from now on I pay a bit more and use true name brand media. I have NEVER had any problems with any of the major DVD media suppliers.

Since Amazon was running an excellent sale on this product I tried to email Ridata at the US Califonia HQ in California at the address given on their website for a response to my QC inquiry on the recent poor reviews. At least for today my ISP kicked back the email saying for the given Ridata address (email server) would not accept the email and that this was a permanent error. I guess I'll pass until I hear more positive results.

These disks perform as advertised. I have used many of them and all burned perfectly. I have a Plextor 8X DVD burner.