NEC 6500-A Problem - Coaster Problem

I have been having a strange problem with this particular burner. It came with my Dell Inspiron, and I am currently running the 203D firmware.

I have been using FujiFilm 52X CD-Rs and been burning that at 24X with various AVI files for play in my Philips DVP-642 player. Now, I have just been "grabbing" discs from a spindle here.. so I may have gotten another brand in my batch pre-testing and the last three or four discs had a DISC ERROR on the DVD player roughly at the same spot on every disc, something like 25-30min into the film, about a third of the way into the disc. I scanned these discs using NERO Scandisc and it reports a damaged sector or two in the place of the disc where I am experiencing the problem.

I have tried different firmware, different burning programs and nothing seemed to relieve the problem, and I'm out of those FujiFilm discs.

Now, I just burned a SmartBuy 52X at 16X and the DVP-642 read through the disc fine. I also just burnt a Sony 52X at Max speed (24x on this drive) and it also read fine.

I did a search on Google, and pulled up a hit on a person with the SAME EXACT PROBLEM. The thread is outdated and theres no answer revealed, but I'm wondering if this problem is experienced by many users.. What problem would rear its head like that and plague more than one person? It sounds like a highly specific issue.

Do I have a hardware problem here? A media problem? Or some kind of software setting/buffering problem?

Any help would be appreciated.

---

Last edited by BoxingNut83; 18-09-2005 at 23:00.

I have noticed a similar problem burning CD-R at 24x on my 6500. I have tried all the available firmwares, tried all different brands of media and always the same result. I even scanned the discs on different drives to make sure. Always a huge spike of errors at the same place. I can drop back to 16x and the problem completly disappears. I finally decided that if NEC can't fix this problem or they don't care this will be the last slim type drive I will purchase with the NEC name, nor will I recommend NEC slim type to anyone else. What is sad is I also have a NEC 3500A and it is an excellent burner. Attached is a sample scan of one of these 24x burns:

Wow.. No kidding! I wonder what Dell would have to say? Think they'd offer a suitable replacement (Different drive)?

How about DVDs? Are they fine for you?


What I find strange is the Sony working fine.. or at least, as far as I can tell. I don't have any drives here that can do those scans.

I purchased my 6500 aftermarket from Newegg, but it is installed in a Dell notebook.
I would rate the DVD burning of this drive average at best. It is slow, a 8x DVD burn on the 6500 is much slower than a 8x burn on the 3500A. One would think that the more conservative approach to burn speed would help the burn quality but in this case it doesn't.

I am convinced that the CD-R problem at 24x is a firmware issue, becuase of the place where the problem occurs. The drive is no where near 24x at that point. The drive only burns at 24x near the end of a full disc. I believe the drive uses Z-CLV for most if not all of its burns and this spike probably occurs when the drive switches speeds (zones).

Dell will be sending me another type of DVD-RW drive (apparently) in the next day or two.

I guess the moral of the story is, stay away from this drive.