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Good CD/DVD writer for scratched or damaged discs

T

tcsenter

Lifer
I have several audio CDs that are giving EAC (Exact Audio Copy) fits with read and sync errors on the following drives:

NEC ND-3550A 16x DVD Writer
LG GSA-4167B 16x DVD Writer

They're not badly scratched CDs, more like moderately scratched.

Looking at reviews of both drives where they performed extensive read tests on scratched or damaged CDs, both drives are only average.

Anyone know of a drive that has yielded exceptional results in reading scratched and damaged discs? Obviously I would be looking for a drive that is still fairly available on the market.

TIA!
 
Review sites like http://www.cdrinfo.com or http://www.cdrlabs.com usually mention that in their reviews as they have some standardized test disks as well as some roughly-treated personal disks that they test with. There are also disk repair kits (use cleaning and filling substances to do the repairs) that are available - sometimes they work sometimes they don't do much. The big-box stores usually have them - some have a little machine to do the work others are more manual-labor intensive. You should be able to find some reviews on them around the web.

.bh.
 
Well some of my favorite drives are Plextors and Asus. Check the reviews on those first.

The plextors still available in the market are: 716A and SA(sata), 740A similar to Benq 1640), 755A and SA and the 760A (I skipped the 750A because it isn't up to their usual standards and the 716AL because it's too pricey). Not sure of the current model numbers of the Asus.


The 740A, 755A and 760A all did very well to excellent on the error correction tests at CDRInfo.

The older Asus (Pioner based) not so well - the new one (ASUS DRW-1608P3S) did much better.

The recent Samsung SH-S182D seems to be very good on the error front as well but could do better on some writing tests. Maybe future firmware updates will take care of that. Cdrinfo tested with the SB02 firmware and SB03 is available now. Not bad at all for under 30 bucks! How the 773H do they make a drive for that???

.bh.
 
I was checking out the BenQ 1640 ~ 1655 models but they don't support C2 errors, which partially explains their stellar error correction performance (they don't even see damaged areas of the CD, marking them as 'good'). In addition, nobody seems to carry BenQ, anymore.

I found a barely used Lite-On CDRW drive I forgot about in my closet. It seems to get much better results on most (but not all) of the scratched CDs. Thanks!
 
I too have been impressed by the Samsungs. Their 162C DVD-ROM managed to read my handful of seriously damaged CDs where all else had failed - including my well guarded set of Yamaha CD burners (including a CRW-F1) and SCSI CDROM drives - and my new 182M DVDRW appears to do no worse.

Burn results with my 182M (Firmware SB02) have been a mixed bag - it appears to have a dislike for Verbatim 16x DVD-R media, but for example error rates on HP 16x DVD-R are impressively low. (Samsung support has done an excellent job on it - confirmed the Verbatim problem and seem to have a firmware update in the works.)
 
Strange that Verbatim was not in thier proofing collection. Most makes that I know of proof on Verbatim and TY as a minimum.

..bh.
 
They do - the 182D does a fine job with Verbatims at 18x, and apart from TY media, they're the only ones Samsung list as 18x compatible. This appears to be a firmware fsckup in the latest release for the 182M, to be corrected soon. Early 182M reviews (using SB00 firmware) had good results with Verbatim media, and I'm sure Samsung will be able to bring that back in ...
 
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