I purchased one of these drives last month and it has been great, that is with the original 9L02 firmware. To explain further, the other day I updated to 9L08 and the burns haven’t been that great. I use Verbatim MCC 004 and I’ve gotten some strange results with the updated firmware. Simply speaking, scanning the burnt discs reveals a huge spike of both PIE and PIF at the very start of the disc. I also scanned a disc that was burnt with 9L02 and it was fine (I’ve read about some drives having a bug in which a spike of errors at the beginning of a disc).
I realize that these scans should be taken with a grain of salt, but what bothers me is that things aren’t consistent (9L02 burns vs. 9L08 burns). Anyways, I downgraded back to 9L02 (thanks to Codeking’s site for listing it) and everything is fine, as before.
So, has anyone encountered such problems with 9L08?