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Is my DVD-RW drive failing?

post #1 of 7
5/12/07 at 7:45pm
Thread Starter 
My 2.5 year old Lite-On SOHW-1213S drive is now suddenly taking about 3 times as long to burn DVD-R media (both data and DVD video with more than one software program). What once took about 14 minutes at 4x is now taking over 40 minutes. I am now also seeing the buffer hover around 40% when it used to sit at over 90% during a burn. Is this a sign that my drive is starting to fail?
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post #2 of 7
5/12/07 at 9:33pm

Re: Is my DVD-RW drive failing?

Do yourself a favor and spend the $35 on a new NEC DVD burner, and never look back!
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post #3 of 7
5/13/07 at 11:56am
Thread Starter 

Re: Is my DVD-RW drive failing?

Did Sony buy out NEC? There is only one NEC available at NewEgg.com but there are a few listed as Sony/NEC.

My Lite-On has burned probably 500-600+ DVD-R, DVD+RW, and CD-R discs over the past two and a half years and it was only supposed to be a temporary drive when I bought my PC so I guess it could be time to upgrade now.
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post #4 of 7
5/14/07 at 2:09pm

Re: Is my DVD-RW drive failing?

Oh snap! Didn't realize that NEC got gobbled up by Sony. Perhaps it's time to look at the Lite-on units as well, then. Either way, the drives are so cheap nowadays, it's easier to replace then troubleshoot/repair.
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post #5 of 7
5/14/07 at 10:50pm

Re: Is my DVD-RW drive failing?

Todd,

The burner might have switched back to PIO mode. Make sure it's at DMA...
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post #6 of 7
5/15/07 at 11:49pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Is my DVD-RW drive failing?

I ended up ordering a new Lite-On 20X burner with LightScribe™ (the LH-20A1H) from newegg.com for $37.99. I received it today and installed it this evening. So far I have burned 3 DVD-Rs and this thing screams compared to the old one.

I guess I can take the old one to work and slap it into that PC since they were too cheap to get us DVD-RW drives in our new machines.
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post #7 of 7
5/17/07 at 10:43pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Is my DVD-RW drive failing?

Quote:
The burner might have switched back to PIO mode. Make sure it's at DMA...

I noticed that my DVD-ROM drive has been acting weird with DVDs recently as well. Playback is a bit jerky now and I seem to be using a lot more CPU than I used to. As a test, I took a DVD and started ripping it to the hard drive and was only able to get a 1.5X read speed and the CPU seemed to be working a lot harder than normal. I opened up the device manager and took a look at the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers to make sure that DMA was enabled and I notced that there were duplicate entries for both the primary and secondary channels. Is this normal or could this be why my DVD-ROM drive is acting up? By the way, DMA is enabled all the way around.

EDIT: I uninstalled the secondary instances of both the primary and secondary channels and rebooted. They both reinstalled themselves and I am now seeing 12X+ read speeds from the DVD-ROM drive.
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