caution with new media in old drives
Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2003 8:21 pm
A couple of weeks ago, I tried some modern 48x-rated disks in a 3 year old drive that seems like something from the Pleistocene by today's standards:
The disks were readable, but a surface scan with CD-Speed showed a lot of errors:
Samsung/Plasmon 48x: 30% damaged, none unreadable
TDK/Ritek 48x: 20% damaged, none unreadable
It's becoming increasingly difficult to find media that performs well with these old drives. It's probably best to replace a drive like this, since it doesn't have any buffer under-run protection either. Otherwise, it may be worthwhile looking into audio disks (despite the pound of flesh for RIAA/GEMA or whoever) because these have to do well at low speeds for standalone recorders.
Indidentally, C1 reporting in CD-Speed (mostly) didn't work with this drive, even though it's a LiteOn: The scan "completed" immediately. In one try, it did start reporting seemingly realistic values, but the speed shown was negative. I couldn't reproduce this though.
G
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LITE-ON LTR-0841, Firmware MS84, Speeds: 32/8/4
The disks were readable, but a surface scan with CD-Speed showed a lot of errors:
Samsung/Plasmon 48x: 30% damaged, none unreadable
TDK/Ritek 48x: 20% damaged, none unreadable
It's becoming increasingly difficult to find media that performs well with these old drives. It's probably best to replace a drive like this, since it doesn't have any buffer under-run protection either. Otherwise, it may be worthwhile looking into audio disks (despite the pound of flesh for RIAA/GEMA or whoever) because these have to do well at low speeds for standalone recorders.
Indidentally, C1 reporting in CD-Speed (mostly) didn't work with this drive, even though it's a LiteOn: The scan "completed" immediately. In one try, it did start reporting seemingly realistic values, but the speed shown was negative. I couldn't reproduce this though.
G