dbminter Posted January 9 Posted January 9 WOW! Is ASUS UTTERLY clueless! Here's the last e-mail I sent them. Quote: Well, I've got news for you. Someone needs to get up to date! I just got one of these units from Amazon.com and ImgBurn lists the firmware as 3.11! Here's the log entry for the device on look up search: I 15:31:17 -> Drive 5 - Info: ASUS BW-16D1HT 3.11 (D:) You may have meant there is no firmware update package for 3.11 and 3.10 was the last firmware update package released into the wild by ASUS, but ASUS HAS developed a 3.11 firmware that appears only to be on models that ship directly from ASUS factories. Unquote Here's ASUS reply to that: "Thats good news let me know if the issue is resolved."
dbminter Posted January 9 Posted January 9 Playback test of inkjet printable MKM Verbatim DataLife Plus/AZO 8x DVD+R DL passed.
dbminter Posted January 9 Posted January 9 Had a few extra minutes to run some other tests. They weren't really necessary, but they were quick, so I ran them. CD Audio disc read to image test passed on the following media: Memorex CD-R Verbatim DataLife Plus/AZO inkjet printable CD-R Verbatim DataLife Plus/AZO branded surface CD-R Memorex 24x Ultra High Speed CD-RW
dbminter Posted January 10 Posted January 10 I am a tad bit concerned about the read speed of Memorex Ritek 2x BD-RE. I read in a bootable DVD image written to a BD-RE that was about 800 MB, but took 1 minute to read in at only 2.8x. I 16:17:51 Source Media Type: BD-RE (Disc ID: RITEK-BW1-001) I 16:17:51 Source Media Size: 801,112,064 bytes I 16:19:06 Average Read Rate: 11,176 KiB/s (2.5x) - Maximum Read Rate: 12,163 KiB/s (2.8x) Of course, this was a very small data set. A larger set might read faster.
dbminter Posted January 10 Posted January 10 Some more tests I had a chance to perform: Disc image read of a bootable DVD written to Memorex Ritek 2x BD-RE: Passed. Bootable DVD image written to Memorex Ritek 2x BD-RE: Passed. Booting of bootable DVD image written to Memorex Ritek 2x BD-RE: Passed.
dbminter Posted January 11 Posted January 11 Playback test of Verbatim DataLife Plus/AZO inkjet printable 16x MCC DVD-R: Passed.
dbminter Posted January 11 Posted January 11 Playback test of Audio CD of Verbatim DataLife Plus/AZO inkjet printable CD-R: Passed.
dbminter Posted January 11 Posted January 11 Playback test of Audio CD of Verbatim DataLife Plus/AZO branded surface CD-R: Passed.
dbminter Posted January 11 Posted January 11 Playback test of Audio CD of Memorex 24x Ultra High Speed CD-RW: Passed. This is the last of the major tests, save for 6 DVD+RW playback tests, but I don't know when I'll have the chance to test those. And a few small tests, like Audio CD track extraction.
dbminter Posted January 19 Posted January 19 Playback test of DVD Video of Ritek RICOHJPN-W21-01 8x DVD+RW: Passed.
dbminter Posted January 20 Posted January 20 Playback test of DVD Video of Imation Ritek RITEK-008-00 8x DVD+RW: Passed.
cvmanjoo Posted January 22 Author Posted January 22 Thank you for your tests and results. Did you tried burning BD-R DL? Video BD?
dbminter Posted January 22 Posted January 22 No to both. Actually, I've never burned a single BD-R DL before. I've burned BD-RE DL's in the past, but never the WORM variety.
dbminter Posted January 23 Posted January 23 I did find one drawback. Like with the LG WH16NS60, 16x Verbatim BD-R only write at 12x max. Now, 12x was the maximum set write speed. Actual write speeds may get to 16x, but I doubt it. This BD-R I wrote didn't even get to 10x because it was less than half capacity. Now, this isn't the same as a BD Video disc test, but what I did was I had 2 DVD+R DL's of DVD Video of some home movies. I copied the VIDEO_TS folders of both discs to a temporary location and burned them to a BD-R. I then used DVDShrink to read back in the VIDEO_TS contents from the BD-R and write new VIDEO_TS outputs. No visible errors and no write abends. Write operations completed okay.
dbminter Posted January 30 Posted January 30 I do feel the need to pass this along. It appeared to be a fluke, but it did happen, so it's worth noting. I had a DVD-R of home movies converted to DVD Video. I know this disc was playable because after I created it just the other day, I read it to an image file with ImgBurn, loaded the image file in DVDShrink, and wrote a new VIDEO_TS output to test it. It passed. Sunday, I put the same disc back in and copied the VIDEO_TS folder in File Explorer, but it would not play or load in anything, even DVDShrink. I put the disc back in today and read it back into an image that did read properly in DVDShrink. So, I haven't quite figured it out yet. It may have just been a fluke. It may have been a issue with the USB enclosure. On the LG WH16NS60, you have to sometimes turn off the enclosures and turn them back on before Windows will recognize data from DVD's. Some kind of Windows bug. A similar one may have happened in this case. Plus, I've been unable to reproduce the issue. Sunday, I copied another DVD-R of home movies the same way without issue just before the one I described above.
dbminter Posted February 16 Posted February 16 Thought I'd better pass this along. I had an audio CD where when I inserted it into the ASUS, ImgBurn got stuck in an infinite loop of Adding Devices and Removing Devices attempting to read it. When I put the disc in my Pioneer, it was fine.
dbminter Posted February 16 Posted February 16 It happened again. So, it looks like one of the faults of this drive has to do with playing audio CD's. It may not be a good candidate for that.
dbminter Posted February 16 Posted February 16 It happened a 3rd time. All these discs were in the same boxed set from BBC Audio. So, it could be isolated to just this boxed set. I have another boxed set coming up BUT it's ALSO from BBC Audio. Plus, there's no guarantee this incompatibility is limited to JUST the ASUS drive. It may be a case of incompatibility between the ASUS and the OWC enclosure it's in. With a VanTech enclosure, this issue may not be present.
dbminter Posted February 18 Posted February 18 It appeared to be a fluke centered on the authoring of those 5 discs on which it ultimately happened to. I then processed 3 more BBC Audio CD's followed by 5 more and then 5 more again, all 10 also from BBC Audio. No issues with those. Of course, the only discs it happened to were 5 of the 14 discs in the boxed set that I bought the set for! The story of my life...
dbminter Posted February 20 Posted February 20 Just had my first write failure. On Layer 0 of an MKM 8x DVD+R DL. And it wasn't even a full Layer 0. The failure wasn't at the layer change. Could be a fluke. Won't know until 2 more failures in a row followed by swapping in the known working LG WH16NS60 and a disc from the same cake stack.
dbminter Posted February 20 Posted February 20 Hopefully, it was just a fluke. The next disc in the stack was fine. And the previous disc was one of 3 at the bottom of the stack. And this was a newer stack. I won't know for sure unless it repeats with regularity.
dbminter Posted February 24 Posted February 24 Had another failure. This time high quality AZO DataLife Plus Verbatim branded CD-R. Hopefully, it's another fluke, but I am worried about these numbers of "flukes" that are now appearing. I have to wonder if the tests that PASSED were flukes.
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