Yamaha 4416 and CD-RW discs; Yamaha 6416 and Retrospect

Yamaha 4416 and CD-RW discs Last time, we briefly mentioned a reader report that "Yamaha's CRW4416SX drive apparently cannot read Memorex CD-RW disks, although it does work with Memorex CD-R disks. Yamaha tech support said the drive has problems with Kodak, Maxell and Memorex disks and suggested using Sony, TDK, or Verbatim instead." This elicited numerous replies from readers:

Memorex Greg Hartwig confirms this, but adds: "I think 'cannot read' is a bit strong. I've been using Memorex CD-RW disks for about 9 months now with out problems. Only recently have problems started happening, so some drives may be more sensitive than others. I also found that when I write to Memorex CD-RW disks at 2x speed, the disks would verify while they were sometimes failing when writing at 4x speed."

Rik Goyton confirms that "the trick is to make sure that you burn the disks no faster than 2X."

Robert Bradford has had no trouble with Memorex CD-RW discs.

Kodak David Craig confirms an inability of the drive to read Kodak media. But Barney Buoy contends that "the latest Kodak's do indeed work fine since the release of the Classic Gold and Classic Silver lines. The Kodak blue discs do however cause unbelievable nightmares."

Another reader claims that you can rewrite to the Memorex CD-RW discs work but only if he fully erased the disc first. He could read the discs just fine in any case.

Yamaha 6416 and Retrospect On a related matter, Charles Watts-Jones received the following note from Dantz regarding using the Yamaha drive with Retrospect:

"We've verified that there is a bug in the Yamaha 6416 firmware 1.0c (just released this month). Though the Retrospect Driver Update 1.7 does introduce support for this drive, customers have been reporting error 100 when backing up to it due to the firmware bug. We've come up with a few suggestions to work around this problem: use a faster backup Mac if there is one available, or try to increase the data rate by disabling software compression, or minimizing external activity during backup."