Opti Drive Control - supported drives and chipsets

Hi freaks,

before asking this I did a lot of search on both, the web and here in cdfreaks but with no result.

Erik lists on his website an number of drives of which all are dated (manufactured 2004-2006) except the Optiarc AD-7x and that are all supposed to use the Mediatek chipset (the MS1868/9?).

I have checked my 2 BenQ DW16xx drives and they do not have Mediatek chipsets. They use Philips PNX786x. My PX-716AL has a Sanyo LC897492 chip in it.

Is there a list of supported drives or chipsets elsewhere? Maybe even hardware revisions?

I'm looking to buy a drive that does not surpress E32 and POF errors on media. I have a couple of CDs and DVD that do have E32 and POF (CATS result) but they are not reported in media scans on all of my drives. Seems the error correction of the drives sorts them out. Spec define error testing in single pass for CD and DVD. Consumer drives are obviously designed for best correction performance rather than for detecting and pointing out defects.

Thank you for your comments.

Apparentely the info on drive support is a bit confusing.

It should say that basically all drives with a Mediatek chipset are supported and also BenQ drives with the Philips chipset, certain Plextors with the Sanyo chipset, Pioneer drives with a NEC chipset and NEC drives with a NEC chipset.

I hope that clears things up

The BenQ DW16xx and Plextor PX716 are about the best drives you can get for disc quality scanning.
These drives support the CD Bler test which can show all Exx errors on CDs.
They can also report POFs but that is not shown yet in the current version of ODC. This will be added in a later version.

The CDSpeed supports BD quality test with Liteon iHOS104 but ODC doesn't. Hopefully ODC will add support in later version.

How bout Renesas chipset ?

The discrepancies may be caused by:

1.The BenQ and the Plextor drives are more compatible than the CATS with those discs.
2.The BenQ drives gave false-negative results in the E32 or the POF values. The answer can be found by doing TRT in addition.
3.Both of the above.

I am afraid you won’t be able to find a consumer drive on the market to give error levels as high as that of the CATS except for discs of top or bottom quality, unless you will settle for a second-hand unit.

Would you post some of the results given by the CATS, the BenQ and the Plextor for comparison? I believe that many people will be highly interested. Although my friends and I have done some comparisons, I have promised not to publish them.