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General questions about Micro advantage 52x24x52x cdrw

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General questions about Micro advantage 52x24x52x cdrw

Postby computation on Mon May 26, 2003 12:29 pm

Is anybody familiar with Micro advantage 52x24x52x cdrw?
It looks new on its page:
http://www.microadvantage.net

Who made it? Is there any info about its firmware(update)?
Thanks.
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Postby CDRecorder on Mon May 26, 2003 4:05 pm

I think it's made by BTC, but I'm not sure.
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Postby computation on Thu May 29, 2003 11:39 am

OK now I'm sure that my "micro advantage" 52x24x52x drive is made by BTC. I just flahsed it to the latest version 001H with the file 5224V001H.exe from BTC.

Also see the posts here:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=9512

Here is the cdspeed result: Image
(you may need to used http://math.150m.com/ide5224.jpg if you can't get the picture).
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Humm

Postby 4zkxa on Tue Jun 03, 2003 6:04 pm

I recently bought a BTC 52x24x52 (made in China by Top Glory Electronics) rebagged under Micro Advantage brand. I used it to read and write intensively, about 14/24 for about a week. I think it's an average drive. Here is more details if you want to know:

1. Casing: The case looks very nice. The buttons are solid to the touch. The tray open quitely, there is some padding to prevent air.

2. Read: I used the drive to play a game (constant reading). For about the first two hours of playing, the game runs quitely, from then on, the drive got really loud, and seems to have trouble reading the disk, I think it got overheat or something. Audio can only be read at about 30x, VCD is 8x.

3. Write CD-R: The speed seems really slow. I used a 48x media, burn about 700 MB of data at 48x and it tooks about 7-10 minutes. Burning audio takes even longer, about 11-15 minutes.

4. Write CD-RW: Mount Rainer and Packet Writing works fine. Sometimes burning with low speed media (1x-4x) produces write errors.

5. Buffer Underrun Protection: The drives uses SuperLink, which doesn't seem to work very well. I used Nero to burn about 700 MB of data, ran 3 cpu and disk intensive programs (mpeg encoder, asf splitter, and defrag), and also copy a 300 MB file from one hard drive to another. After the Nero buffer (which I limited to 1 MB) ran out, the drive buffer survives on its own for about 20 seconds (jumping between 20% and 100%), then I got a write error.

Overall, if you don't need buffer underrun protection, satisfy with slow speed, and can handle a coaster sometimes, then this drive is for you, otherwise, try some other brands (except benq and accesstek I think, they suck).

It seems all cdrw drives are made in China now, does anyone knows any brand beside the expensive Yamaha that isn't made in China?
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Postby CDRecorder on Tue Jun 03, 2003 6:23 pm

Welcome to CDRLabs, 4zkxa! :D

It sounds like DMA is not enabled on your drive. See the FAQ forum to enable it. Enabling DMA will improve your writing speeds.
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Thanks

Postby 4zkxa on Fri Jun 06, 2003 5:47 pm

Thanks LiteOnGuy, but I already enable DMA when I got those results.

The funny thing is when I run cdspeed, the drive burns pretty fast. But actual burning is a different story.

It took about 20 minutes for my old drive to burn an audio cd at 4x, and it took about 15 minutes for the new drive to burn at 48x. Not much improvement. I wonder if it is because my files are in mp3, and the drive needs sometimes to decode them?
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Postby CDRecorder on Fri Jun 06, 2003 7:54 pm

Maybe DMA isn't enabled on your HDD.

How fast is your CPU, and how much RAM do you have?

BTW, see this post. CD Speed will sometimes allow faster burning than the computer will in actual use.
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