Bassthang

I had no luck finding firmware (or any support for my device) on Samsung's sites. But I did get an email address that may get me what I need eventually.

Wow! I had no idea this feature existed! Amazing! IMGBURN has so much under the hood.

This is the nearest I can find to the issues I remember: https://www.electronicspoint.com/forums/threads/cd-r-w-drive-spindle-clamp-magnet-catastrophic-failure.61054/ I've also been onto Samsung's support pages and got the address for their optical drive support dept. (I had to ask a chat operator). I'll see what they have to say about firmware.

Full-size internal CD, DVD and bluray drives with trays used to clamp the disc. The clamps had magnets to hold them together. There used to be lots of problems with the strength of those magnets varying over time (I think they often became stronger) and the drives not holding (or not releasing) the discs and jamming up. I can't find anything online about this now, but a few years ago it was definitely a thing. You could find articles explaining how to put small shims inside to increase the gap and reduce the magnet's effect. I remember doing it a couple of times, but it only worked for a while. Odd that I can't find those articles now!

Thanks for the suggestions. I hope it's not the drive! This has been the most reliable writer I've ever had. It's a USB-connected Samsung SE-506. What I like about it is that, being a slimline drive, it doesn't suffer from that problem where the magnets that clamp the disc in place change strength with time, rendering the whole unit useless. The disc is simply held by some spring-loaded bearings. Or is that issue a thing of the past now? From your post, it would seem that there are problems with just about every system. This is an awful state of affairs. You mention updating firmware. Is this something that needs to be done when new discs come to market, or just when new features are available? I vaguely recall seeing mentions somewhere of having to update drives to use different media. Perhaps that's what my problem is. After all, these are different and newer discs to those that the drive worked well with.

Update. . . I've been off doing other things for a while, but tonight I got back onto burning BDRs. Same cake of discs. So far, awful results! However, I'm not 100% sure it's just a bad batch of discs. Because of the nature of the files, this next disc had to be UDF. Partway through writing the disc, it all went quiet. I checked IMGBURN and saw a report at the foot of the screen about waiting for the HDD threshold. Sure enough, Windows Task Manager showed 100% HDD activity, with "System" being at the top. I killed some update processes (which shouldn't even be running, as I opted to stop updates for a few weeks), and the HDD went down to a decent level. IMGBURN kicked back into life again. This happened a few times during a very long write process. The Verify process was also slow, and about 1/4 way through started producing read errors. Although IMGBURN offers to ignore the errors after a while, there were so many (>138 so far - it's still running. . .) that the verify process may take hours. I'll probably just give up. Looks like I've got a coaster. . . Some background: this is a Dell Inspiron laptop which came with Win10, which has given me some grief for quite a while. It was great when I first had it, but a couple of Windows updates along, it went very slow. It had a complete wipe and clean re-install which seemed to help for a bit, but a few months after that it was slow again. Worse than that, it often just locks up with 100% HDD, often with Win update processes hogging it all, or sometimes just System. Sometimes the machine runs well. But - usually at weekends - it goes into this spiral of degrading performance, eventually becoming useless for a few hours while it's doing "something". I have to go off and do something else until it feels like working for me again. I used to blame MS for their rubbish OS, but I have an older (also Dell) laptop that runs Win10 perfectly well. So I'm guessing that Dell have just built a lemon this time round. BUT on the other hand, this is the same machine, same USB drive and the same IMGBURN that quite happily burned scores of BDRs for me a couple of years ago, so maybe it is just poor quality discs. I think I'll fire off a complaint to Verbatim - what's the point of even selling these discs if more than half of them are not going to work?

Thanks for the quick response, dbminter. Much appreciated. Sorry for the delay in replying, but it's been a rollercoaster few days here, and I'm just catching up on things. . . That's reassuring about those rings. I've never seen those before (on Verbatim or other media), so I was worried for a while. I'm in England. I used to buy my BDRs from Scan, but I bought this last cake from Amazon to save a bit of money (free delivery). If CMC make the worst optical discs out there, then that implies there are better discs to be had. Which manufacturers do people on this forum recommend? Or is it a case of sticking with Verbatim and checking very carefully that they are home-grown Verbatim discs rather than outsourced CMC discs? Perhaps order them from a supplier in the USA? Sorry if I've misunderstood, but I'm still getting to grips with this very unclear situation. This is rather like the situation I remember a couple of years ago, when I was getting concerned about whether the current Verbatim discs were HTL or LTH (as I'd heard that some were HTL and others LTH - and there being almost no way of knowing) and writing to Verbatim's support to ask the question. I was reassured that all their discs now used the inorganic HTL. I thought that from then on I could relax and just re-order Verbatim discs in future. I never thought that they'd flog the whole system off to another (lower-quality) supplier. How on earth did it come to this? What do IT professionals use these days for their archiving? (I used to be an IT support person, but left the industry in 2010, so I'm mostly out of touch.) I suppose it would have to be M-disc. I might resort to buying some of these for the most important files (recording session multi-track backups, which these days can run into tens of GB per song).

I've used IMGBurn for years to write archive discs - mostly of my music files (multi-track projects in Pro Tools and Cubase, WAVs and MP3s). It's rarely caused any problems (apart from understanding how to do certain things in IMGBurn). I've used Verbatim BDRs consistently for many years. I recently ordered a new cake of Verbatim Datalife BDRs and used some to burn discs of some music projects (files only) on my WinXP PC. No problems. Then I moved to my Win10 laptop and did a BDR of some large video files. (I don't normally do this - I just copy my video files to a HDD. But I thought while I had the writer out I should give it a try.) One file was >4GB so I was prompted to use UDF format. I found that option and set it up. IMGBurn also kept telling me that it wanted to change the format as it detected a video file in the root, so to ensure it just did a file backup I put all the files into a folder, so nothing was loose in the root. It's supposed to be a backup disc, not a playable disc. The job ran and completed successfully. However, Win10 wouldn't read back the disc. I was surprised, as I can't really recall the last time I had a disc fail that wasn't due to something I did wrong. Both machines used the same USB laptop-style Samsung Blu-ray writer (which is the best media writer I've ever used). ALL the discs I've written from this new pack are a bit weird - I can see dark rings on the disc surfaces which look to me like some sort of write failure (not merely where the write ended - all discs were pretty much full). Photos attached of the bad disc and one of the "good" discs - all from the same batch. I don't see these rings on discs made using previous batches of Verbatim BDR. The possibilities are: 1) I haven't correctly used IMGBurn for this format of disc (likely). 2) Windows10 has problems with reading UDF discs (I haven't yet tried it on other machines: I have WinXP, Win7, and Linux PCs to try it with, and I can borrow a Mac) 3) The new Verbatim discs are a bad batch, but the problems are only showing up (so far. . .) on the UDF formatted job. 4) Those "W 23:23:04 Device Arrival Detected!" lines in the log look like the connection to the USB drive might have been intermittent? I''d have expected this to kill the ongoing job though. . . I really hope it's not (3)!!!! I've just spotted a thread in this forum saying that Verbatim sold their process to another company that already has a reputation for producing poor quality discs. I'm not too bothered about the video files (although a bit annoyed that for the first time in ages I've ended up with a coaster), but I'm starting to worry about the long-term reliability of the music project discs. If the Verbatim discs are now poor quality, which brand of discs do forum members recommend? I can't afford to buy MDISC! Log file of the failed job (note that the job itself was successful): ; //****************************************\\ ; ImgBurn Version 2.5.8.0 - Log ; Saturday, 09 April 2022, 23:34:40 ; \\****************************************// ; ; I 22:58:41 ImgBurn Version 2.5.8.0 started! I 22:58:41 Microsoft Windows 8 Core x64 Edition (6.2, Build 9200) I 22:58:41 Total Physical Memory: 4,057,340 KiB - Available: 653,060 KiB I 22:58:41 Initialising SPTI... I 22:58:41 Searching for SCSI / ATAPI devices... I 22:58:44 -> Drive 1 - Info: TSSTcorp BDDVDW SE-506CB TS01 (D:) (USB 2.0) I 22:58:44 Found 1 BD-RE XL! I 23:02:07 Operation Started! I 23:02:07 Building Image Tree... I 23:02:07 Checking Directory Depth... I 23:02:07 Calculating Totals... I 23:02:07 Preparing Image... E 23:02:07 File size exceeds the limit imposed by the ISO9660 file system. E 23:02:07 Name: [filename removed from log] E 23:02:07 Size: 4,528,493,937 bytes E 23:02:20 Operation Failed! - Duration: 00:00:13 I 23:02:39 Operation Started! I 23:02:39 Building Image Tree... I 23:02:39 Calculating Totals... I 23:02:39 Preparing Image... I 23:02:39 Contents: 7 Files, 1 Folder I 23:02:39 Content Type: Data I 23:02:39 Data Type: MODE1/2048 I 23:02:39 File System(s): UDF (1.02) I 23:02:39 Volume Label: [Not Configured] I 23:02:39 Size: 24,837,447,428 bytes I 23:02:39 Sectors: 12,127,663 I 23:02:39 Image Size: 24,838,012,928 bytes I 23:02:39 Image Sectors: 12,127,936 I 23:02:39 Operation Successfully Completed! - Duration: 00:00:00 I 23:02:45 Operation Started! I 23:02:45 Building Image Tree... I 23:03:01 Calculating Totals... I 23:03:01 Preparing Image... I 23:03:01 Contents: 7 Files, 1 Folder I 23:03:01 Content Type: Data I 23:03:01 Data Type: MODE1/2048 I 23:03:01 File System(s): UDF (1.02) I 23:03:01 Volume Label: Films and TV 1 I 23:03:01 Size: 24,837,447,428 bytes I 23:03:01 Sectors: 12,127,663 I 23:03:01 Image Size: 24,838,012,928 bytes I 23:03:01 Image Sectors: 12,127,936 I 23:03:08 Operation Successfully Completed! - Duration: 00:00:23 I 23:03:08 Operation Started! I 23:03:08 Source File: -==/\/[BUILD IMAGE]\/\==- I 23:03:08 Source File Sectors: 12,127,936 (MODE1/2048) I 23:03:08 Source File Size: 24,838,012,928 bytes I 23:03:08 Source File Volume Identifier: Films and TV 1 I 23:03:08 Source File Volume Set Identifier: 5489B85600B90EBD I 23:03:08 Source File Application Identifier: ImgBurn v2.5.8.0 I 23:03:08 Source File Implementation Identifier: ImgBurn I 23:03:08 Source File File System(s): UDF (1.02) I 23:03:08 Destination Device: [0:0:0] TSSTcorp BDDVDW SE-506CB TS01 (D:) (USB) I 23:03:08 Destination Media Type: BD-R (Disc ID: CMCMAG-BA5-000) I 23:03:08 Destination Media Supported Write Speeds: 2x, 4x, 6x I 23:03:08 Destination Media Sectors: 12,219,392 I 23:03:08 Write Mode: BD I 23:03:08 Write Type: DAO I 23:03:08 Write Speed: 2x I 23:03:08 Hardware Defect Management Active: No I 23:03:08 BD-R Verify Not Required: Yes I 23:03:08 Link Size: Auto I 23:03:08 Lock Volume: Yes I 23:03:08 Test Mode: No I 23:03:08 OPC: No I 23:03:08 BURN-Proof: Enabled I 23:03:08 Write Speed Successfully Set! - Effective: 8,992 KB/s (2x) I 23:04:08 Filling Buffer... (80 MiB) I 23:04:11 Writing LeadIn... I 23:04:30 Writing Session 1 of 1... (1 Track, LBA: 0 - 12127935) I 23:04:30 Writing Track 1 of 1... (MODE1/2048, LBA: 0 - 12127935) W 23:23:04 Device Arrival Detected! W 23:23:04 The device list will be refreshed at the next available opportunity. W 23:23:47 Device Arrival Detected! W 23:23:47 The device list will be refreshed at the next available opportunity. I 23:30:10 Synchronising Cache... I 23:30:19 Closing Track... I 23:30:20 Finalising Disc... I 23:31:39 Exporting Graph Data... I 23:31:40 Graph Data File: C:\Users\[username removed from log]\AppData\Roaming\ImgBurn\Graph Data Files\TSSTcorp_BDDVDW_SE-506CB_TS01_09-APRIL-2022_23-03_CMCMAG-BA5-000_2x.ibg I 23:31:40 Export Successfully Completed! I 23:31:40 Operation Successfully Completed! - Duration: 00:28:31 I 23:31:40 Average Write Rate: 15,760 KiB/s (3.6x) - Maximum Write Rate: 26,946 KiB/s (6.1x) I 23:31:43 Searching for SCSI / ATAPI devices... I 23:31:49 -> Drive 1 - Info: TSSTcorp BDDVDW SE-506CB TS01 (D:) (USB 2.0) I 23:31:49 Found 1 BD-RE XL! I 23:34:38 Close Request Acknowledged I 23:34:38 Closing Down... I 23:34:38 Shutting down SPTI... I 23:34:39 ImgBurn closed!