"Overclocking" DVD drives?

[VirtualLarry]

Was using a friend's machine the other day (that I helped him build), and he has a brand-new shiny 22X Samsung SATA burner, the SH-S223F. It seems like a good burner, but after burning at an attempted speed of 18X (slowed way down in the middle, so it wasn't a real 18X burn), it did the verify phase, and that only ran at 2.4x-4.0x. Horrible!

So did a little Googling for Samsung 22X riplock, and found this . It has firmware patching features galore, and I downloaded the SB03 firmware (fresh this Jan), and patched out riplock, and viola. Now it starts read speeds at 6.5x, and it takes 7:30 to rip a dual-layer 5GB DVD, instead of 16min, with DVD Decryptor.

I did a similar thing months ago for my LG 20X IDE Burner, an H55N, using a program called MCSE. It greatly speeds up my DVD burning, because the verify phase doesn't lag anymore.

So, how many people here do this? Are there any other peripherals that you "overclock"?

 

[SickBeast]

I used to do this on my Pioneer DVD drive to allow it to burn cheap 4x discs at 16x.

You can mess around with pretty much all of the hardware in your computer if you really want to.

 

[nyker96]

yeah i bought a s223f as well. haven't patch it yet but gonna. it removes riplcok.

 

[conlan]

There was a procedure for flashing Lite-On (IIRC) CDRs several years ago, worked great.

I haven't flashed any optical drives since.

 

[Idontcare]

Sounds awesome, but here's the dumb question - why aren't these drives capable of doing this without the hacks?

Are you sacrificing read/write quality for the gains in speed? Or are you unlocking artificially placed handicaps on the hardware put their to differentiate higher-priced models from lower-priced models?

Getting something for nothing sounds great, but what else are you getting?

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Idontcare
Sounds awesome, but here's the dumb question - why aren't these drives capable of doing this without the hacks?

Are you sacrificing read/write quality for the gains in speed? Or are you unlocking artificially placed handicaps on the hardware put their to differentiate higher-priced models from lower-priced models?

Getting something for nothing sounds great, but what else are you getting?

Well it can cause burn failures if you try to say burn 16x on a crappy 1x DVD or something. Typically each brand of media is validated at a certain burn speed. I was having problems with Ritek discs so I flashed my drive.

 

[spinejam]

fyi: cdfreaks.com has numerous forums for specific drives detailing firmware patching, write strategies & riplock removals. good peeps over there too!

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f61/