ewanfoleor said:
Most cheap DVD’s are produced in Asia where there are less strict guidelines.
Verbatim doesn't just buy a load of generic DVD’s and pasts on their own logo.
They produce their own DVD’s in Germany, under strict European guidelines.
Thus supplying a steady quality that is similar to the original Wii disks.
This is why Verbatim - DVD’s cause less wear and tear.
And there are diagnostic testing methods to check this.
Ahahahahaha.
You do realise that the best quality Verbatim-branded discs are produced in Japan (rebadged Taiyo Yuden single layers), followed by Singapore (dual layers manufactured under contract for Mitsubishi Kagaku with MKM's dye), followed by Taiwan (single layers manufactured by CMC Magnetics under contract for Mitsubishi Kagaku with MKM's dye), don't you? I've never heard of made in Germany Verbatims before and a quick google didn't turn up any results. Also given that Mitsubishi Kagaku (Verbatim's parent) outsource their manufacturing to several other companies the "steady supply" stuff is silly.
Sure, I'll concede that made in Hong Kong or made in China media is usually dreadful, but given that the best media in the world is made by Taiyo Yuden in Japan, it's downright ridiculous to suggest that all DVDs manufactured in Asia are crap.
Wear and tear on a slot-loading optical drive comes from these things:
1. Use of the laser. The laser unit will eventually pop its clogs due to laser diode failure or lens failure and need replacing. The more usage the drive gets the faster that will happen. Turning up the strength of the laser ("pot modding") will wear it out faster because the laser is shining brighter.
2. Movement of the laser unit. The motor controlling the movement of the laser unit will eventually wear out. It's a moving part, and moving parts wear out with use.
3. Use of the motors for loading and spinning the disc. The motors spinning the disc and pulling the disc into the drive will eventually wear out too.
4. Interaction of moving parts with the other parts of the disc drive and from the environment, causing physical failure of some sort. A DVD drive produces significant vibration, and there's a disc spinning in there at at least a thousand RPM. People also bump or drop their consoles. The drive goes through hot-cold cycles in colder climates. These are what happens when little plastic bits break or fall into the wrong places and cause failures.
I'd like to, for a moment, take you for a wander down memory lane. Do you remember the GameCube's drive? It was very picky about media, and in fact Verbatim was
not the best choice for it. Instead, it required media with a higher reflectivity - RITEKG04 was generally thought to be the best option. RITEKG04 was abysmal media, it would develop holes in the bloody recording layer after as little as a few months! But that was what the drive was most happy reading (until it degraded, at least). The best disc in general is not always the best choice for a particular situation, and the worst disc is not always the worst choice either.
The main issues that generally separate good quality discs from bad quality discs are burner compatibility and degradation over time. Some discs are fine in terms of not degrading, but have lower burner compatibility (e.g. CMC MAG media codes). ProdiscF02 have exceptional longevity but poorer burner compatibility, and so end up in the bargain bin. As long as you get a good burn with your burner, it doesn't matter if other burners have trouble with it. Degradation is important, but most DVDs made in the past couple of years are at least OK for that. So the issue is reading drive compatibility. Incompatible discs are going to cause DREs, but not drive failure.
The diagnostic methods for testing Wii discs that anybody smaller than Nintendo would have access to are disc quality scans (Nero DiscSpeed, DVDInfoPro) to indicate the quality of the burn. It's not unheard of to get >=95 quality scores on burns on "poorer" media like CMC with a good burner. If you had the resources you could test a large number of Wii drives with recorded media (and, given the DVD Video support built into the drive, I'd say the manufacturer did) and see whether it had an effect on MTBF. With all due respect, someone who repairs/mods consoles does not have enough data to make a proper assessment, and you're forgetting that even if you did that correlation is not causation - people who use crappy discs are less likely to take good care of their console, for example, and people who use the cheapest discs they can are more likely to be burning (and using) a lot of them.
I'd also like to take issue with your description of the issues surrounding disc thickness. If the disc is too thick, the laser will not be properly focused and chances are it just plain won't work. If the disc is unevenly thick, it'll put more stress on the motor and introduce vibration. It'll also cause the laser focus to vary, causing intermittent read issues. But all that can do is cause higher wear and tear, read retrys, slower loading times and DREs. The laser beam exits the laser diode, is focused by the lens and reflects off the disc surface. Pits cause it to reflect in a different direction, which is read by a sensor. I don't know how much, if any, control the firmware of the drive has over the strength of the laser, but ultimately it is constrained by the setting of the potentiometer on the laser unit. Wii users generally don't need to touch the pot so it stays at its Nintendo factory setting. Then there's the fact that Verbatim discs can vary in height by whether they're silvertops, inkjet printables or LightScribes, and by the actual manufacturer anyway...
