Higher Capacity CD-R's ??!?!?!?!?

[NeoEcho]

I've heard a couple of mentions of 870 Mb CD-R's on this message board. I've looked around on E-Bay and found a couple people selling them. Are they a legitimate option? Have any of you used them? Do they work in most newer CD-RW's? Do DVD players generally recognize the extra surface area? I've got alot of questions on this and I bet others do as well.

[Super Warrior]

Blehh they are no big deal.And i hear they don't usually work all that well most of the time.Compusa used to sell their own brand of them,but i heard they were discontinued because of how many complaints they were getting.

I bought a 10-pack of 870MB CD-Rs once.But i never found out if they were worth a crap or not,because that was also the same time that i was really getting into the DVD-R stuff.So it was'ent worth messing with and the 10-pack is just gathering dust on my shelf.

Besides i say just forget about that,if you really want more storage space.You should just make the jump to DVD-R which is far superior than any CD-R.

[sterno]

I've used 99-min, if you look through the forums you'll find some other posts talking about 90- and 99-min discs. Tom's Hardware Guide also had an article about them a while back.

Compatibility is decent, though not perfect. 90/99min discs are nonstandard, they violate the standards that specify how large the spiral on the disc is and how tightly it's wound. However, most players and burners can follow it OK. It's actually harder to find burners that can write them than players that can read them. A lot of burners can't write past a certain point because of the firmware, or they have trouble writing the data properly all the way out at the edge of the disc. You usually need to burn at a relatively low speed to work reliably.

It wouldn't surprise me if CompUSA had too many problems with them, being a retail chain means that they have a lot of customers who think that their operating system is IE and/or that AOL is the internet. In general, you have to tell your burning software to overburn the disc (with things like Nero giving a dire warning about possibly damaging your burner), even though the 90/99min discs have the extra capacity.