Write Speed Different From What is Advertised

[SaberBlaze]

I have some blank dvd-r's by the brand name of TDK. They state they support burn speeds of 1-16x. The device window of imgburn states the supported writing speeds are 6x, 8x, 12x, 16x, 18x. The burner supports up to 20x, which I assume means 1-20x. So if the discs say they support 1-16x, why can't I burn below 6x? That's the information that the burner is giving imgburn, correct? So the drive is incorrectly stating the speeds, the slowest of 6x and the highest of 18x (which surpasses the advertised burn speed). Is there anything I can do?

 

Btw, my burner is an external usb2 drive. HP DVD 1040d according to imgburn, although since it's an external drive I believe the enclosure is HP and the actual burner inside is another brand. Thanks for your help.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

Nope, you're stuck with the speeds your drive/firmware supports on that media.

 

The thing is, burning at slower speeds doesn't mean your drive will produce a better burn.

 

If the firmware has been tweaked in such a way that 12x or something is actually the best speed for that MID then that's the speed you should be burning at.

 

It just might be a case of trial and error on the first few discs where you burn at each of the available speeds and then scan them using DVDInfoPro/CDSpeed to see what the PIPO error rates are like.

[SaberBlaze]

Well ok, but it's just that for some Linux live-cds, we're told to burn at a lower speed because of the high compression that those live-cds use. However, I think speeds of below 8x should be fine, so 6x is acceptable I supposed. Thanks for your help.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

I don't see that high compression within an image has anything to do with a need to burn at slower speeds.

 

Don't get me wrong, slower DOES normally mean a better quality burn but there's MAX, slower than MAX and then SLoooooooooooooooooow.

 

Somewhere between MAX and Slooooooooooww is just fine - and that's normally 8x or 12x (assuming the use of 16x media. On 8x media you should be ok to use 8x or 'MAX' as it's the same thing!)

 

It's perfectly possible that Sloooooooooow will produce a worse quality burn than MAX will, but it all depends on the drive/firmware/media combo.

[SaberBlaze]

Oh ok, thanks for your help Lightning. I was only reiterating what we are told. In the distro I use, if anybody has any issues with the system (after installing I believe) the first thing they ask is if you burned it at a recommended slower speed, since large amounts of data are compressed into a much smaller space, any byte or bit that's off might cause errors later on. Well, that's all beyond me, if I need to burn a live-cd I'll use 6x. Again, thanks for your help.

[LOCOENG]

any byte or bit that's off might cause errors later on.

 

Verify your burns and you'll know that the bytes and bits are all like they are supposed to be.