L-EC Uncorrectable Error with Verbatim External Drive

[jpmonge86]

Hello,

 

I recently ripped some ISOs using DVDFab passkey, I can play these without a problem, but now I am trying to use IMGburn to burn these. I just got the discs and got the unit some months ago.

I have a Verbatim Writer 70102 and I am using Smart Buy BD DL, I have tried to burn the same title 4 times already and I keep getting the L-EC error. I am attaching the log.

 

Any help or pointers as to the root cause of the issue would be very helpful.

 

Thanks.

 

Jose

ImgBurn01-24.log

[dbminter]

Try something other than Smart Buy BD.  They're made by Ritek.  The Disc ID is RITEK-DR3-000.  Ritek can be iffy media for some burners.  I know my PS3 won't properly playback Ritek BD-R.  Try getting Verbatim BD-R and see if your experience improves.

 

Particularly, DL media is generally only of any quality if it's made by Verbatim.  At least in the realm of DVD+R DL, Verbatim is the only manufacturer of any quality media out there.

[jpmonge86]

15 hours ago, dbminter said:

Try something other than Smart Buy BD.  They're made by Ritek.  The Disc ID is RITEK-DR3-000.  Ritek can be iffy media for some burners.  I know my PS3 won't properly playback Ritek BD-R.  Try getting Verbatim BD-R and see if your experience improves.

 

Particularly, DL media is generally only of any quality if it's made by Verbatim.  At least in the realm of DVD+R DL, Verbatim is the only manufacturer of any quality media out there.

Thanks a lot for the advice, I will try that.

[dbminter]

Oops, I should have said get BD-R DL instead of BD-R, since you'll need double layer BD for this project.

 

Now, I've never used Verbatim BD-R DL before.  I'm only going on my experience with Verbatim BD-RE DL and DVD+R DL.  So, I don't know for sure if their DL BD media is actually any good.  Just going on past experience.  I only use Verbatim's BD-R and BD-RE DL.  Although some Verbatim BD-RE DL was made by TDK, which was also good.  And given that Verbatim's MKM DataLife Plus DVD+R DL is the only quality DVD+R DL out there other than TDK's, I'd think Verbatim's BD-R DL should be of better quality.  However, I don't KNOW that for sure from experience.

[jpmonge86]

I figure and yeah, it makes sense. 

Now let me ask you something, how critical or important is the supported writing speed, say a disc only supports 4X vs one that supports 6x, would that be more prone to errors or issues?. Also, is there some type of test I could do in the unit to confirm its not faulty?, I have used it for ripping blurays without a problem, and I also burned a couple of BDs 25/SL (using a non-ritek disc). This unit is relatively new, I got it in November. 

 

Thanks,

 

Jose

[dbminter]

Personally, I've never found the speed to be a deciding factor.  I use quality media and hardware so my biggest concern has always been how fast I can get the burn completed.  I've never had a case where burning at the fastest available speed was ever an issue.  However, some people find that when writes fail at higher speeds, they try lower speeds and get better results.  Slower speeds are generally "better" so you may want to try these Ritek discs at a slower speed and see if you have better results.  I didn't think about that when I initially posted because speed, as I said, was never a deciding factor for me.  Slower speeds can reduce the possibility of write errors.

 

The only real test you could determine is to get a known good quality BD-R DL and try burning it.  If you get repeated failures (I generally go by the rule of 3.  After 3 failures, I generally start trying to pin down if the hardware is at fault.) then you can start questioning if your hardware is at fault.

 

However, the vast majority of problems we see on this board are caused by cheaper media.  And Ritek is a cheaper kind of media.  Verbatim BD-R is quality BD-R that they make themselves.  However, even Verbatim will make cheap CMC CD-R, DVD+/-R, DVD+R DL, and BR-RE SL.  Verbatim used to make its own quality BD-RE SL but now they farm those out to cheap CMC   And any of Verbatim's Life Series media (NOT DataLife Plus Series.) you find in a physical store will be CMC junk.

[jpmonge86]

Great information and feedback, I ordered a Verbatim spindle from Amazon plus 3 BD-DL RE for testing. 

Thanks a lot!, as soon as I get those, I will tell you how it goes.

Jose

[jpmonge86]

Hello,

 

I got some good news and some bad news, good news is I got both my BD-R DL discs and BD-RW DL discs, I burned the iso in the rewritable verbatim discs and everything went great, no issues or errors, clean burn. That gave me confidence to move to the BD-R discs, which are verbatim too, but as I was verifying, I got a different error (I chose to ignore and operation comlpleted), not sure how critical this is, but my understanding is there should be no errors at all. I am attaching the log for this.

 

Any insight or feedback would be very helpful.

 

Thanks,

ImgBurn 02-01 ROCKY2.log

Jose

[dbminter]

You shouldn't be getting that many Miscompares and I'd be reluctant to believe that disc would play properly in a player.

 

If I had to hazard a guess, it may be the drive you're using.  I looked up the BDR-UD03 and noticed it's a slim model.  Your log said your drive is connected by USB, so I'm guessing you put this BDR-UD03 in an external enclosure?  Or it's a BDR-UD03 already contained in its own enclosure.  Anyway, it's not the USB part I'm worried about it's the fact that you're using a slim model drive.  Slim model drives are notorious for being junk.  Returning bad burns and verify failures an awful lot.  My first experience with a slim drive was the middle of last year and it only backed up what I've seen on this forum.  It won't write CD sized image files to 8x Ritek DVD+RW without failing the Verify stage.

 

And while you won't like this, my next step would be to drop the BDR-UD03 drive all together.  Get another Pioneer but try the 209 series half height BD drive.  Particularly the 2209 if you can find it because it supports XL and TL BD media.  They make an UltraHD BD 4k version but if you don't play on using that type of media/movie, there's no need to get it if you can't find the 2209, although those have been discontinued to force you into the more expensive model.     And then get an external enclosure for half height drives.  Something like Other World Computing's enclosure or the VanTech.  You already appear to be using USB anyway, so it won't be too difficult to do.  It just will mean investing more money into hardware and taking a bath on the cost of the BDR-UD03.

[jpmonge86]

Thanks for sharing great feedback!

[dbminter]

We aim to please! 

 

Now, it's always possible your BD could play fine.  I'm not entirely sure what the nature of a Miscompare means.  I guess it means that the sector contained in the image file when being compared against the sector being checked on the disc do not match.  Which, I would guess, is not a good thing.  However, the Miscompare could be the result of a bad read from the source file, meaning the source drive with the image might not be being read correctly.  It's generally more likely, though, when an optical disc error occurs, it's the result of the disc and not the source drive.  Either it didn't burn correctly by the drive or the disc was cheap or the drive has some kind of incompatibility with the media.

 

Another reason I suspect it's the drive is it may be its age.  I'm guessing that BD drive is an older generation model.  Its firmware may not have up to date write strategies for the newer media.  You could try checking for a firmware update to your drive.  In Write mode, right click on the drive in the drop down dialog of target writers and choose Check for firmware update near the bottom of the context menu that appears.