Cheap and Nasty (Traxdata CD Media)

Member Name: MichaelR

Product:	Traxdata CD Media
Date:	10/05/01 (552 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Ummm, nope, that's it.

Disadvantages: Unreliable, Poor Quality, Unstable at high speed

Traxdata... well, from the moment you first set eyes on the box you have to have concerns!

Traxdata CDs come in lurid yellow and blue boxes which give the impression of something cheap and nasty lurking within. If you should be unfortunate enough to purchase a box and make use of the contents, then you will quickly realise that you should have listened to the alarm bells ringing inside your head and left them on the shelf as Traxdata make just about the poorest quality recordable CDs on the market.

The great attraction with Traxdata is the extremely low cost per CD. As well as the hideous yellow boxes, you can also buy Traxdata CD media loose - either in sleeves or jewel cases, or on spindles. The spindles of Traxdata CDRs give the lowest cost-per-megabyte ratio.

Now, you may think that less than 50p per 650MB of data storage sounds like good value for money. Well, perhaps it is, until you consider that roughly half a box of Traxdata CDs will be completely unusable.

Traxdata CDRs suffer terribly from mysterious, unexplained errors during the burn process. Your test can go fine, but you then start the burn and about half way through Nero, Easy CD, or CDRwin will report a simple "Error in Burn Process". You will then remove the CDR from your burner and witness a nasty, streaky effect in the dye on the reflective layer...

I know this to be a problem with the media itself as I've not had this problem with any other kind of media in my CD re-writer, but I HAVE experienced this problem with Traxdata CDs in a separate (Plextor) CD re-writer.

And Plextor don't make bad CD writers.... far from it.

The other main problem with CDRs from Traxdata is that EasyCD seems to have problems closing them. Nero often suffers writing the lead out on them too.

Again, I am pretty sure this is a media problem and not a software issue as I only have the problem with Traxdata.

Traxdata CDRWs are
equally poor. Formatted for use with DirectCD, they will quickly degrade and become unusable. You'll also notice that the full allocation of the CD capacity is not often available after formatting...

There also seem to be problems erasing Traxdata CDRWs, so I can only conclude that there is a problem with the makeup of the CDRW.

Traxdata CD media is really terrible. Their CDs are best used to prevent cups from leaving nasty rings on your coffee table. As a data storage solution they are absolutely useless.

Avoid these and spend a little extra money on a quality brand such as Memorex.

(Price quoted is for a box of ten CDRW - CDRs roughly £0.48 each without case)

Summary: