SONY DRU-720A

[Confederate]

Nero, Roxio, take your pick. I just bought a brand spanking new Sony DRU-720A, uploaded the latest firmware into it (JY03?) and threw some files together to write a disk. It did so with no errors; however, the time I had to wait before the bloody thing began recording was 42 seconds. With my NEC 3500, it's like 3 seconds before all the progress bars start moving.

What is causing the 720A so long to get started. It's like a swim meet where the pistol goes off and everyone jumps into the water except one person. And the reviewers are apparently counting only the time it takes once it begins the writing process.

I'm not happy about this at all and am rapidly losing respect for Sony. The last time I bought a Sony, in fact, the NEC 3500 appeared and blew it out of the water and at a fraction of the price.

Does anyone have any ideas for possible improvement? I'm using it as the master drive on the secondary IDE channel. The NEC is the slave and works like a charm. In fact it writes just as fast if not faster than the Sony given the media I'm using.

Thanks!


Confed

[code65536]

LiteOn/Sony drives have long lead-in times, and this is normal. All the reviews that I know of do take this into account, however (because just about every program that measures burn time, including Nero and CD-DVD Speed, include the lead-in time into the final time count).

[Ian]

In the end, there isn't much of difference between the Sony's and the NEC's writing times. In the case of DVD+R media, its only a few seconds.

[Confederate]

Well, I'm used to "lead in" times of 15 seconds or less. What's it doing? Defragging my hard disk before writing a disk?

Confed

[Ian]

I'd like to say that the DRU-720A is calibrating the laser to the media, but if that was the case, the writing quality would be better than it is.

Most drives take longer than 15 seconds to do a leadin. Heck, I think it takes that long for some drives to start writing a CD.