batch of failing media?

[itsmethatyou]

is it unusual or has anyone ever seen a box of dvd+rw in effect go bad one after another? like over a few weeks, maybe a few days after each other another disc starts to have problems? I'm up to 5/6 out of a box of 10 and just had another 'go bad' last night. the discs are verbatim MKM/A02. they had all been working fine the past year or two since I got them, the trouble started just recently.

the discs have been reburnt anywhere from 10-20 times each for some up to a couple hundred for others but don't know if the ones w/highest rewrites are the ones failing. I have a trusty old pioneer DVR-111D (fairly up-to-date firmware) I've burnt many thousands of cd/dvd with, cleaned the lens a few months ago. I added a new samsung SH-224BB a few months ago. the pioneer is pata/ide and samsung is sata. nothing I'm aware of on my system has changed recently, I've used the same setup to burn many thousands of discs.

what happens is I burn an mpeg2 on either drive, burn seems to go ok. I put it in my tv's dvd player and it barfs it back out. I pop that disc into one of the drives and get these (I use linux so can monitor this in the system log):

klogd: sr 8:0:0:0: [sr1] Unhandled sense code
klogd: sr 8:0:0:0: [sr1]
klogd: Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
klogd: sr 8:0:0:0: [sr1]
klogd: Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
klogd: Info fld=0x20
klogd: sr 8:0:0:0: [sr1]
klogd: Add. Sense: L-EC uncorrectable error
klogd: sr 8:0:0:0: [sr1] CDB:
klogd: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 02 00
klogd: end_request: I/O error, dev sr1, sector 128
klogd: Buffer I/O error on device sr1, logical block 16

I realize it says "medium error" but I've done a lot of searching and have seen the cause can be software related too so aren't sure atm the discs are bad.

those msgs keep looping about once every few seconds for up to 5 - 10 minutes during which time the drive is essentially locked up.

then often as not if I wait long enough I can do dvd+rw-mediainfo (linux tool) and get disc type and whatnot. but I can no longer mount it, if I try I just start getting the above messages all over again. a couple times I waited it out for the messages to come to a stop and was able to reburn it/run in dvd player like nothing is wrong.

I've been using both drives for burning/mounting, I'm not sure they have anything do to w/the trouble. so logically this seems to indicate the discs themselves? but I've never had a package where many/all started to fail one after another, has anyone else?

[hech54]

is it unusual or has anyone ever seen a box of dvd+rw in effect go bad one after another

I gave up on RW discs about a year after they became affordable. They are junk.
Even when I planned to rip the disc to my computer and never touch the DVD again, I'd use +R disc, finalize it, rip it then throw it away. It's 1000% better than missing the recording altogether.

[lordsmurf]

DVD+RW doesn't last long. DVD-RW was better.
There's no such thing as a "batch" of media, unless you mean 100,000+ discs. That's batch.