It almost seems like yesterday when the CD burner became mass-market and consumers rejoiced in having a low-cost, capacious storage medium that could be used for a myriad of uses. While the CD was relatively capacious relative to other storage media at its release and even into the introduction of consumer-level CD-recorders towards the mid-to-late
90s, as hard drive capacities and multimedia capabilities grew, the CD began to feel a little small.
Making a CD fit more information is not a new idea. Sony’s mostly-forgotten DDCD format was announced in 2000 and available in 2001 used a mixture of techniques including shortening pit-lengths, tightening track pitch, using more of the inner radius and changing error correction algorithms to squeeze in twice the capacity into a disc of the same size. A key downside was the need to use special DDCD media and incompatibility with the wide installed base of CD drives – aside from the CRX200E, there never was another drive that supported the format.
But it wasn’t the only attempt to get more out of a CD. After the wide success of BURNproof technology that saved many discs from becoming coasters, in late 2002, Sanyo introduced their next innovation – HD-BURN.
The Technology
The promise of HD-BURN was simple – twice the storage of a regular CD-R, on a regular CD-R. Unlike DDCD, users did not need to use a different type of disc. Initially aimed at data applications, it was claimed that such HD-BURN discs could eventually be readable in ordinary DVD-capable drives with a simple firmware upgrade although this seemed to be wishful thinking as this didn’t appear to eventuate. In other documentation, Sanyo indicated their willingness to support efforts to integrate their system into such players. The effort was a bold one, following through with promises to standardise the format as IEC 62403:2005 and EN 62403:2006. Discs could be burned using B’s GOLD by B.H.A and Ahead Nero.
How it worked was similar to DDCD – it utilised shorter mark lengths (0.62um) and changes to error correction coding (R-S product code) to achieve the additional storage capacity. By not changing other parameters, it did not need special media, but the marks did become small to the point that optics ordinarily used for CD may not be sufficient to read the marks well. I suppose this is why it is proposed HD-BURN discs be read mostly with drives that also supported DVD in some way (as I suspect, but cannot confirm, it may “abuse” the DVD optical assembly to read-back the written data, albeit noting that some CD dyes don’t work well at DVD wavelengths).
I first became aware of it when I saw an option to make an “HD-BURN” project in Nero, but I never had a compatible drive. So I decided to do some hunting to see if I could give HD-BURN a try before it were to disappear forever.
On the Hunt
Looking around for HD-BURN capable drives, it would seem that Google gets confused by HD-DVD and burning HD video to discs. Nevertheless, a bit of digging seemed to show that a series of older Optorite (DDxxxx) and MSI drives (DR4-A, DR8-A) were quite well-known for having HD-BURN capabilities.
Digging further, I discovered that the commonality between these makes of drive are that they were all produced by Accesstek and had a Sanyo chipset. I dug further, looking into Videohelp’s DVD Writer List, shortlisting drives that were known to be both Accesstek produced and with a Sanyo chipset (therefore, very likely to support HD-BURN assuming firmware is not an issue). I also found some drives that were sometimes Accesstek and Sanyo, but these will depend on their revision. I also found plenty of Sanyo-based drives that were non-Accesstek made – the most numerous of these are Plextor drives which probably explains their “unique” GigaRec technology that allowed for “squeezing” more data onto a CD-R by shortening pits but by a more limited factor such that existing CD drives might be able to still read them just fine. Then, there are drives that might be Sanyo and might be Accesstek … but also maybe not. It’s not clear from the database, as there may be several hardware versions.
For the full list, see the Appendix that follows the end of the article. But unfortunately, despite creating such a list, I discovered the number of options didn’t really increase by all that much when one considers the other brands may be much less common and thus the drives wouldn’t be all that available.
The Drive
Despite trawling the depths of eBay, my choices were few, with only three options available to my knowledge. Two of them were overseas – one was simply way more than I was willing to pay, the other had allowed users to submit offers, but none of my offers were taken. As a result, I settled for the Optorite DD0201 from a local seller, at an affordable price.
I’d never heard of the OptoRite brand before, but apparently in 2003, CDRInfo reviewed the successor DD0203 and at the time, claimed the brand to be an “upcoming and very promising” Taiwanese manufacturer. By 2004, CDRInfo reviewed the DD1205 and even published a short post to let everyone know the DD1603 was on its way. In any case, all the reviews don’t paint a glowing picture with regards to burn quality. What happened to OptoRite, I’m not sure, but I did hear somebody whisper that Lite-On bought them out.
Nevertheless, I now have an OptoRite drive in my hands – it feels mostly like a drive of the era – 5.25″ form factor, half-height, the “regular” full depth rather than the shorter drives of future years. It has a weight commensurate of drives of the era – not being light and “hollow” like more modern units. Impressively, the bezel is 3D – it protrudes out slightly, having a shape that gives it a bit of character and style. It’s even black, in an era where the most common colour may well have been beige …
The underside is plain – no heatsinking depressions to be found..
Mounting holes on the side are standard, with a still-intact warranty sticker.
As part of its age, there is still a 3.5mm headphone output and volume knob, along with a play/skip button in addition to the stop/eject button. The drive, therefore, can play audio CDs on its own albeit with a very limited user interface. But this is a DVD-era drive, so it’s a bit late to still be hanging onto those features. The drive itself is dual-format – logos for the dash camp on the left and plus camp on the right, with CD in the middle.
The rear panel is rather distinctive in terms of the font and labelling moulded into the plastic. This seems to be a unique trait of the Accesstek-made drives, thus the MSI units are also seen with similar-looking rear panels.
I checked the device capabilities with ImgBurn and interestingly enough, HD-BURN is simply a format that isn’t “detected” by the software. The other features are correctly detected, including its 8MB buffer. It seems the firmware is slightly out of date, as 2.60 was released and modified to be RPC1. I didn’t want to flash the drive in case anything was wrong – it would have to be tested first.
Checking with Nero InfoTool also doesn’t check whether the unit is HD-BURN capable. It would seem that HD-BURN really was a “special” vendor mode that never received wide standardisation. As a result, even burning HD-BURN requires the use of either Nero or B’s Recorder.
For this test, I will be using my “trusty” copy of Nero 6.6.1.4. It has “known compatibility issues” with Windows 7, but most of the functions I care about work just fine for me.
Indeed, it does see that the drive supports HD-BURN – it says it under the “Disc types” line.
Where’s my HD-BURN?!
In order to test HD-BURN, I started an HD-BURN compilation.
From there, I dragged a 1400MiB random data file into the compilation to fill it up.
I then put a blank disc into the drive, hit the burn button and confirmed the settings. It would seem that it’s not possible to simulate the burn, but that’s fine.
Then, Nero spat my disc back out at me, complaining that there wasn’t enough space. What the hell, man?
This doesn’t make sense – when the blank is detected, the software indicates the disc is the right type (i.e. HD-BURN). But it’s detected with its ordinary capacity of ~700MiB.
Checking the disc information dialog confirms the HD-BURN capacity as expected. So this is very perplexing – it would seem to me that someone may have caused a software regression as it seems that somewhere late in Nero 5.5, HD-BURN became supported and now in my copy of Nero 6.6, it appears to be broken.
I was not yet defeated. I thought I could just settle for burning 700MiB onto the disc, but in HD-BURN mode, leaving half the disc unoccupied. Surely this “compromise” should appease the bug, right?
The drive began to whirr. But then, after some crunchy noises, it stopped.
An attempted burn at 24x to CMC Magnetics media failed at the start with a Power Calibration Error. This is perhaps not unusual for older burners with problematic lasers, or if it just doesn’t like the media. Often a slower speed can help.
Trying again at 4x, the slowest supported speed, and I’m getting another Power Calibration Error. It seems the drive just won’t burn. I fed it some Prodisc, Plasmon and Ritek CD-Rs to no avail. It just wasn’t happy.
In fact, I could tell that the drive was tired. It didn’t detect the disc correctly half the time, locking up the drive spinning at high speed. Other times, it just would detect no media.
Perhaps I could have some luck burning non-HD-BURN CDs instead just to see if the drive was sound.
A burn at 24x started off just fine …
Not long after, it lost its tracking and threw a “No Seek Complete”, coastering a disc. It just was not a healthy drive and I felt really bummed about it. Thwarted by both software and hardware, my HD-BURN journey would end here.
After coastering a few more discs, I managed a single CD burn at 4x though, but the result wasn’t readable in any drive, including itself.
While the drive was very much unwell, there was a potential for a bit of help – apparently some people have had success twiddling with a few potentiometers, but I wasn’t going to risk doing this to a drive I just bought.
In the end, I must apologise to the eBay seller who sold me this drive listed as used. Unfortunately, the drive didn’t behave itself and that’s not unexpected given its age. But I was hoping to message the seller and perhaps come to a resolution but I didn’t realise eBay’s UI changed so as to make the “contact seller” option much less visible and so ended up submitting a return request which seems to have been automatically approved with a postage label. I ended up dispatching the drive back, without noticing that the refund was approved just before the drive was lodged. So unfortunately, this would have ended up costing the seller the return postage as well, which made me feel quite guilty … my bad!
Some Fun with Overburning
Before sending it back though, I decided I should probably have some fun with testing overburning on the drive, both for CD and DVD. While newer drives typically don’t overburn DVDs at all, older drives and their lax firmware may do this just fine, and it would give me a chance to exercise the DVD laser in the drive.
One interesting finding was with my eBlue 99min CD-Rs. These normally detect as 79:59.7x capacity in most other drives but somehow, this drive thinks it’s a 92:59.74. Perhaps it has some special firmware logic to detect the narrower track pitch and “refuse” to do certain things (e.g. HD-BURN) with it. Nevertheless, it wasn’t able to reach the 99 minute mark in a simulated overburn, so it’s not a good drive to use for these super-extension discs.
Testing of ordinary 80-minute CD-Rs gave good overburn time results that were stable, indicating that the simulation does result in a proper laser-following of the groove.
Now we get to the interesting part of DVD overburning. I’ve not really met a drive that could overburn a DVD-R before, as most drives simply “balk” as soon as they hit the stated capacity. This drive, however, just seems to keep on going, simulating a burn but not following the track (obviously).
This seems an invitation to me to try an overburn, perhaps at a reasonable capacity of ~4600MiB == 4.82GB. Rather than waste good media, I started with my problematic MCC03RG20, made well after the burner’s time –
and as a result, not supported by an internal write strategy.
The burn completed at 2x, no problems – exceeding the expected capacity without complaint.
The DH16A6L, tolerant as ever, read the disc smoothly despite its mountain of errors as reported by the PI/PIF scans. I suspect it’s more likely a case of the disc being burned out-of-spec (e.g. symmetry, jitter, tracking errors) causing higher reported errors in the test, but being able to be compensated during a read-out resulting in the smooth TRT.
The iHAS624 is a bit less satisfied with the burn, erroring and dipping on the TRT with a similar error profile. To note, the DW1640 simply wouldn’t recognise the disc at all. Bad burns aren’t unexpected – this is not media it’s expected to work well with.
Let’s try something it might more more accustomed to, from the plus camp.
The overburning test simulated correctly for the DVD+R, in this case, a RICOHJPNR01. It terminated giving a realistic result of 4620MiB = 4.84GB. Really makes the Beall 4.85GB special DVD-Rs seem less special given this result. Unfortunately, attempting an actual overburn write threw an error. Perhaps it doesn’t like RICOHJPNR01 for some reason.
The BenQ DAXONAZ1 gave 4646MiB in the test and was able to write close to this amount, no problems.
The resulting burn, as judged by the DH16A6L is not great towards the outer, with high jitter and unrecoverable errors.
This is backed up by the iHAS624 which gave a similar opinion. The DW1640 somehow just doesn’t like the output from the DD0201, refusing to recognise it at all.
The drive has no strategy for the Ritek M-disc, but I was curious what it thought about its overburning capacity. The drive reported 4735MiB (4.95GB) capacity, which seems a little higher than I would expect and doesn’t seem reasonable. Too bad, no M-disc capable burners are likely to actually support overburning.
As a final check, I wanted to see if the RICOHJPNR01 would burn at all, no overburning this time.
I was able to get it to burn at 2.4x.
Post-burning, the drive detects the disc but no longer offers the media-code information. This seems to be a bit of an “old drive” thing, as I’ve encountered some other drives that behave like this.
The result was very rocky with the DH16A6L, with read errors for a significant chunk of the outer diameter. The error scan is horrific and the iHAS624 and the DW1640 simply shook their head at the disc and left the room in disgust. As a burner, the OptoRite DD0201 can create curiously overburned DVD+R and DVD-R discs, but not with any decent quality it would seem.
Conclusion
I feel that Sanyo definitely were hopeful when they launched HD-BURN that it would be a standardised way to squeeze more onto a CD-R which could be useful for more than just data. There was a point where the lower cost of CD-R media might have made sense – for example, VCDs often required two discs, sometimes more, for a feature-length movie and with HD-BURN that might be reducible to just one.
But as with all of these technologies, the fact that it wasn’t adopted by the broader industry was a big downside. Given that Sony’s DDCD which achieved Purple Book standardisation didn’t get far, Sanyo’s efforts to standardise proved to be insufficient as it seems no other chipsets, aside from their own, ever implemented HD-BURN mode. Even when it comes to software, having just Nero and B’s Recorder support HD-BURN does not point towards being an “open” ecosystem. Furthermore, the widely installed user-base of CD-compatible drives that wouldn’t read HD-BURNed discs and the quickly turning tide of cheap DVD media made the format irrelevant for most especially considering that it debuted on burners capable of burning DVD media.
Perhaps it was a technology that simply came a little too late to be all that useful, but as an engineer, I can’t help but admire the audacity and ingenuity of engineers who are willing to try to push the envelope to get a bit more out of something “almost for free”. I do wonder whether such discs with smaller-than-normal marks would have as long of a working life as those burned normally. I suppose the big issue is that someone who may find a stack of HD-BURN backups simply has very little choice when it comes to drives that can read them back. As an orphaned technology, this is one of the big risks.
While I did expend some time, energy and money to try and pursue HD-BURN in 2025, my efforts appear to be fruitless as the OptoRite DD0201 seems to be on its last legs and Nero 6.6.1.4 may well have a regression that means that it falsely claims the disc to have insufficient capacity despite that not being the case. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes, that’s just how things end up.
I wonder if I’ll ever get my hands on a GigaRec capable drive at a reasonable price … hmm.
Appendix: Potentially Compatible Drive List
The following list is based on trawling Videohelp’s DVD writer database. I’ve filtered by different categories, but cannot confirm if the drive does or does not have HD-BURN capability as that may also depend on firmware. In some cases, the same model of drive can have different hardware revisions with different internals, resulting in some of the “might be” entries. Please do your own research before committing to a purchase.
Sanyo + Accesstek
(Quite Likely to have HD-BURN)
- CyQ’ve DR-3080A
- Diamond Data DVDXRW1248
- Diamond Data DVDXRW424
- Diamond Data DVDXRW844
- Enlight 4x DVD±RW
- Fantom Drives FDDRWDF12D
- Fantom Drives FDDRWU2P12D
- I/O Magic Internal 12X DVD±RW/±R (IDVD12D)
- MSI DR12-A
- MSI DR4-A
- MSI DR8-A
- MSI DR8-A2
- OptoRite DD0201/DD0203
- OptoRite DD0401
- OptoRite DD0405
- OptoRite DD1203
- OptoRite DD1205
- OptoRite DD1603
- Sony DRU-530A
- Sony DRU-540A
- Sony DRX-530UL
- TX Galaxy Dual 4x
- TX Pluto Dual 8x/4x
- TX Pulsar 12x
- TX Pulsar 12x DL
- Waitec Action 4
Sanyo + Accesstek
(Only Certain Versions might have HD-BURN)
- Digital Research Internal 4x DVD±RW/±R (DDVDRW4D)
- Digital Research Internal 8x DVD±RW/±R (DDVDRW8D)
- HI-Val HDVD8DBE
- HI-Val HDVDRW4D
- HI-Val HDVDRW8D
- I/O Magic External 4X DVD±RW/±R (IDVDRW4DEU1)
- I/O Magic External 8X DVD±RW/±R (IDVD8DME/BE)
- I/O Magic Internal 4X DVD±RW/±R (IDVDRW4D)
- I/O Magic Internal 8X DVD±RW/±R (IDVDRW8D)
- Pacific Digital U-30182 4x Internal DVD±RW
- Pacific Digital U-30183 4x External DVD±RW
- Pacific Digital U-30248 12×8 Internal DVD±RW
Sanyo Chipset, But Not Accesstek OEM
(Probably won’t have HD-BURN but might have something else e.g. GigaRec for Plextor or nothing at all)
- Plextor PX-704A
- Plextor PX-708A
- Plextor PX-708A2
- Plextor PX-708UF
- Plextor PX-708UF2
- Plextor PX-712A
- Plextor PX-712SA
- Plextor PX-712UF
- Plextor PX-716A
- Plextor PX-716AL
- Plextor PX-716SA
- Plextor PX-716UF
- Plextor PX-716UFL
- Plextor PX-755A
- Plextor PX-755SA
- Plextor PX-755UF
- Plextor PX-760A
- Plextor PX-760SA
- TDK 840G
- TDK 840G External
- Teac DV-W58E
- Teac DV-W58E (Dual Layer)
Possibly Sanyo Chipset, Possibly Accesstek OEM
(Very slim chance of having HD-BURN – inconsistent data)
