dvd burner problems

[ubercaffeinated]

My burner seems to burn quite well at 2x speeds on quality media (taiyo yuden/mcc), but it will not burn at the 4x speeds it is supposed to. It won't burn +rw at all either anymore.

There was a time when it used to do everything it said on the box, but for about a year now I haven't been able to fix this problem. I guess I was satisfied with the burn quality as to not care about it taking twice as long to burn things but lately I've been wanting things to work right.

According to Sony's little drive test program that I ran, the drive is supposed to be in tip top shape. My burns are coming out perfectly as well (movies, ps2 backups, data, music). The gibbed 2x speed is universal, everything (Nero, DVDdecrypter, and imgburn) will burn only at 2x.

I made sure the drive is not on PIO mode, and I even installed ASPI v4.71 just to see if it would make a difference somehow. It didn't. Firmware is the latest too.

Anyone have any ideas on what I can do? Should I just toss this and buy a new burner? I hate the idea of throwing it out just because it takes longer to burn things, but if my burner is failing I don't want to risk making poorly made backups of my data.

 

[azel]

If it used to burn fine and now it doesn't, it's most likely a hardware failure since you've tried everything possible.
The usual suspect is the laser being misaligned or wearing out.
You could try opening the device and adjust the POT for the writing laser, but finding the right voltage for writing would be a tremendous pain since you need to waste a media each try, and you could end up not being able to burn at all.

There's quite a possibility that the laser will further wear-out and become unwritable at lower speeds, but you can't tell for sure. If you don't mind the slower writing speeds, I recommend to turn on "verify" for each burn job to make sure every disk is properly written. You can pick up a new one if verifying starts to fail. I would recommend few years old Pioneer models (DVR-106,107,108) which are known for least writing errors.

Meanwhile, it could be that certain changes in your PC's environment could have triggered the failing of 4x burn speeds. If there are background applications performing lots of writes and reads, the buffer may overflow. Buffer-underrun protection does not always protect against buffer errors depending on the environment, the burning software, and the media. Try turning off buffer-underrun protection and writing a disc at 4x in a completely still environment (with minimal programs running), with verify turned on.