I guess this will raise much debating.
After a couple of days without my 4550 because I was switching drives in my machines, I re-hooked it up and resumed performing transfer rate tests with this drive. I like this drive for TRTs because it’s slightly picky, but not too much. It generally chokes only on discs showing rather poor scans, or on questionable grade media. Handy for cross-checking.
I had about 20-25 discs to test, including MCC004 (Verbatim), MBIPG101 R04 (Imation) and YUDEN000T03 (Verbatim). All these discs had already been scanned with good results at different speeds in Benq 1650 and NEC 3540, and showed perfect reading curves in the Benq.
Everything went fine as expected, when I had a bad surprise when testing my recently burnt YUDEN000T03 (batch TH000020, Verbatim-branded). What a shock.
As mentioned above, all three discs showed pretty good PIE/PIF scans, just with slightly high jitter near the end (~10.5 % as reported by the Benq), mainly the @18X burn in the H22N (no surprise, I’m not expecting low jitter from 18X burns )
I re-runned the TRTs of these T03s for safety. Same figures.
Re-runned the TRTs on the other discs (MBI and MCC), perfect reading curves. So it’s not the drive per se, just that it seems to hate T03s for some reason.
Something’s off with these discs. Never encoutered this behaviour except with lower grade media. I’m done with TY. And this is also the final hammer on the head, for me, concerning the possible relevance of PIE/PIF scanning to predict media readability/compatibility. I quit, my opinion now is that it’s about as rational as astrology.
I’ll hook up my LiteOn 16P1S to perform additional TRTs and will post them when I get some time. Obviously I can’t trust my Benq 1650 alone for TRTs as I had (stupidely) come to think recently.
The first burn is in NEC 3540 1.WB @12X.
The second burn is in BENQ 1650 BCDC @12X, SB OFF.
The third burn is in LG H22N 1.01 @18X.