Should I change this burner?

[Brian Thomas]

I have several external LG "super multi" burners. These day one of them often gives the sort of message sequence as shown in the attached image but the other, identical burners just get on with things with hardly ever a message like that. There is no other known activity taking place on the machine involved on which I have XP installed.

 

I always run a Verification process on all DVDs and 98% of the time all is fine.

 

I'm using a mixture of printable Verbatim and TDK DVD-R discs.

 

Would it be prudent to let this drive go or is it not something I should worry about?

 

Thanks in advance for any opinions.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

It's better if you copy+paste the contents of the log window, the screenshot doesn't provide enough info.

 

Buffer recovery kicking in is normally a sign of a slow source drive, not an issue with the destination one.

 

I assume you're low on RAM and that's why you only have a 20MB buffer. At one point, it took 14 seconds to fill that 20 MB buffer... that's awful throughput from your source drive / system.

[Brian Thomas]

Many thanks for your reply. Very shortly after posting my original message I finished all my burning needs for the time being and in the last couple of cycles of six DVDs (I have six of those LG drives) there was hardly a message!

 

The machine is actually a newish iMac with XP running on it under VMWare Fusion. Although the iMac has 8GB of RAM, according to the XP System Properties it is only seeing 512MB of RAM. I've just seen that VMWare does allow me to alter this - perhaps I should double it? Or some other amount?

 

It was strange that the messages practically only appeared for that one DVD drive and not for the other, mainly newer, drives. That's what made me think it might have come to the end of it's life.

 

My next burning task will only be mid January and to be safe I've just ordered yet another LG drive. I'll monitor things more closely at that time.

 

Thanks!