Hacking Pioneer and Verbatim... WTF?

[Louse76]

So since my burner was having some issues, I replaced it with a Pioneer 112 and some 16x Verbatim Media Mitsu Dye 004.

My first burn at 18x fails outright. My second burn at 16x fails verification and the disc is unusable. CRC when copying back to hard drive from disk (wasn't a game, testing with other files before Wii games). However, it works properly at 8x.

What the hell? These both are supposed to be the end all and be all of drives and media. I'm a little pissed and disappointed.

I have heard others elsewhere say that it can take a few burns for a new burner to calibrate, etc, is this really true?

I ordered a Lite-On SATA drive at the same time. I'm going to test them out for a little bit, and if the Pionner shit continues, then fuck them. Or I'll get a replacement and make sure that Newegg pays for shipping both ways. I'm tired of wasting money on coasters, etc.

That is all. Comments?

 

[shtonkalot]

You may have got a dud burner. It happens sometimes, I had a BENQ 1625 which was bought at the same time as two others for my friends. Their drives were great (I know one still is) and mine was just doing poor quality burns.
I sent it back and got a 1640 as a replacement. It's been great but is not so good with DL media.
My Pioneer 111 is great though and has had no problems as yet.

Now apart from it being perhaps faulty there are some other considerations too.
What is your computer setup? What hardware and OS specifically.
It could be your system config that is giving you some problems.

Is your burner running on an 80 wire IDE cable?
Is there anything else on the cable?
Is the drive running in its appropriate DMA mode?
What software are you using?

 

[Louse76]

OS - XP.

Hardware (Fully stable, runs 24x7) - Abit AN8 SLI, 2GB RAM, Dell ATI x300, 160GB WD SATA, 200GB Seagate, 200GB Maxtor (iirc), 400GB Seagate eSATA, Lite-On DVDRW SATA, 3800+ X2 @ 2.4GHz, adequate cooling, etc.

Software - Nero 7.x (note this was for burning a 4.35GB video file in UDF mode in this case, normally I would use IMGBurn for games)

And from remoting into my system, it appears to be set as Transfer mode: DMA if available and Current Transfer Mode: Ultra DMA Mode 4. That should be good.

So shit burner then?

 

[Sonic_Crash [NL]]

I don't think so. Youre burner can rock but the dvd player in the wii sucks and you have burn games on 4X mostly.

 

[darrrren]

its never good to burn at 16x anyway.i have 3 16x speed writers including a 112d and out of ten diffrent types of disc i could only find one which would burn at 16x and it wasnt verbatim. the 112d needs f/w 0.9 to burn at 18 x .

 

[djgarf]

you should of got the verbatim disks with the taiyo yuden dye type and not the mitsusbishi type

 

[Sick Wario]

get an LG GSA-H22N

i am suprised by your problems as i'm using the exact same discs, 16x verbs with MCC 004 dye
i burn every .iso (downloads and my own rawdumps) in nero at 16x
95% have worked in wiikey at 16x and those that don't i burn at 8x and those always work

LG drives seem best for wii burns/dumps and mabye let nero verify the burns?

 

[kristijan08]

use imgburn, burn @ 12x, upgrade to the latest pioneer firmware and see how you go

 

[shtonkalot]

Yes to the firmware upgrade (stick to official firmware to protect warranty)
but no to burning slower or getting different media. From what I can see at this review (about a third of the way down the page) the burner seems to be capable of an excellent quality burn on that particular disc type.
It does (with the reviewers firmware at least) seem to burn it at 18X too.

Give it a bit more of a go and if it's still failing I would send it back.

 

[darrrren]

even official firmware voids your warranty,but at £20 a drive i wouldnt worry.

 

[satel]

i took my pioneer 112D back to the shop because it failed to burn a good number of my verbatim discs. now i have gone back to using LG burners IMHO they are the best money can buy. never ever failed a single disc & always the quality of the burn is over 98%

never buy a pioneer or NEC again i have had lots of problems with different models of these burners.

 

[shtonkalot]

even official firmware voids your warranty,but at £20 a drive i wouldnt worry.

Spoken like someone with absolutely no idea of what they are speaking of.
I would like to explain why but I think it would be much more fun to hear some nonsensical reasoning from you as to why the company's own official.. recommended firmware upgrades would invalidate warranty.
Go on, I can't wait..

Anyway, all burners are susceptible to problems. My mates LG he bought about 6 months ago was DOA. I sold Lite-ons, BENQ and Pioneers for a while about 2 years ago and quite a few Lite-ons and a couple of BENQ or Pioneer drives got returned for faults.

The 112 is seen as a great quality burner so I wouldn't be to quick to give up.
I intend to purchase a 112 soon myself.

 

[Jeomite]

get an LG GSA-H22N

i am suprised by your problems as i'm using the exact same discs, 16x verbs with MCC 004 dye
i burn every .iso (downloads and my own rawdumps) in nero at 16x
95% have worked in wiikey at 16x and those that don't i burn at 8x and those always work

LG drives seem best for wii burns/dumps and mabye let nero verify the burns?

In my personal experience, I always burn @8x speed despite if the media/burner supports faster.
In reality, the *real* time difference of burning @8x versus @16x is actually 2-3 minutes different (when you burn @16x, the burn actually starts @6x-8x for the first half of the disc, then burns @12x for third-quarter of the disc, and then finally @16x on the remaining quarter of the disc). I rather wait that extra minutes to ensure a high-quality burn, over impatience.

 

[sdoc96]

http://www.cdrinfo.com/ do extremely good optical drive reviews.
Go to "Reviews/Optical Storage" and be prepared to do some serious research, if you want the best.
My first port of call for any new burner.