LH-18A1P Burning Issue

CD, DVD and (Ultra HD) Blu-ray Writers LiteOn / PLDS / Sony Writer
#1

First of all, allow me to express my delight at finding this informative a forum. Never seen anything quite like it on the subject. I also have to apologize for what may likely turn out to be a newbie problem.

A few days ago I bought a brand new Lite-On LH-18A1P drive, burnt a few DVDs and noticed a fairly unpleasant pattern of behaviour. At various points during the burning process the software buffer would begin to drop steadily until it became completely empty, at which point the process would be stalled until the hard drive caught up. This significantly prolongs the burning process and has actually caused it to fail on two occasions. Also, the supposed 16x speed doesn’t exactly match the actual maximum speed of approximately 10x, which I suspect is somewhat less than normal.

The firmware used is GL0C in place of the GL03 the drive came with, however the problem was also present before I updated it and I’ve discerned no actual difference after the change.

Is this an actual problem, or am I just being picky here? Can anything be done?

I’ve taken the liberty of attaching a few ImgBurn pics to illustrate the issue.

#2

Is you hdd and dvd drive have DMA ON? There’s guide here somewhere on checking it if you don’t know how.

#3

Don’t forget to avoid multitasking while burning. :wink:

#4

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=101616 :smiley:

Also, if the guide doesn’t help - uninstall the IDE channel that your LiteOn is on in Device Manager, then reboot.

Windows will re-detect the channel and drives attached to it - and hopefull put your Litey into DMA mode.

#5

They are, yes. HDD’s in Ultra DMA Mode 5, the writer is in Mode 4. That was the first thing I checked before creating this thread. :slight_smile: (assuming Device Manager always correctly displays this, of course)

As for multitasking, I did have a single download running in the background, but seeing as the speed was a mere 500 kb/s, rather insignificant in comparison to the speeds of the writing process, I thought nothing of it. I wasn’t doing anything else and the ImgBurn process was on ‘High’ priority the whole time.

Any ideas?

#6

I just tried turning HT off, but that didn’t change anything. The results, including the quality scan, are virtually identical to everything this drive’s burnt, apart from the two failures. The quality seems pretty decent to my amateurish eye, though the PI error spike near the start is annoying.

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#7

Can you put it in another pc? I’m thinking power supply now or the drive is defective. Try it in another pc to be sure.