Problems with Liteon 48x24x48 CDRW

[Deanodarlo]

I've just bought a brand new Liteon 48246K (the small form factor one) and I'm having problems burning at high speed.

700MB CDRW at 24x works fine.

700MB CDR at 40x work fine.

650MB CDR at 48x works fine.

700MB CDR at 48x works if I keep the data down to approx 680MB

But whenever I try and burn near the capacity of a CDR (say 696MB, approx 712,000KB) I just can't burn at 48x speed. Write errors occur on the outside of the disk.

These CDR disks are the datasafe brand rated for 52x. I've tried another brands rated for 48x but still get the same problem.

I realise the burner is reaching it's full writing speed towards the outside of the disk using CAV mode.

Is there a problem with my burner?

This is a relatively new model with a smaller case than the older 48246S even though they have identical specifications.

 

[Joker81]

how much time do you save going from 40x - 48x. 15 seconds?. You may want to look up firmware updates or something for your drive.
You may also want to check out a different disc. Its possible that your discs are flakey at the end/ or maybe you are getting justlinking and it takes up too much data.

I had a crappy old CDr had some dirt on it. My plextor was able to write to it it but if you looked at it you could see spacing . I don't know how it could read but it did.

 

[Deanodarlo]

You're right, these 52x disks work perfectly at 40x so for the sake of a few seconds I'll just burn them at the lower speed. It's still annoying that you buy a 48/52x burner but have a hard job finding reliable media to use at these speeds.

Had a 4x burner in the past so knew nothing about the amount of problems people have with high speed media. Now I've done a little reading, it seems very common for 700MB disks to fail at high speed burning unless you've got quality media. Guess the writing is just too fast at the outer edge, even though these babies are rated for 52x.

The reason I thought something was wrong with the drive was the disk that came with it failed at 48x speed too. What's the point of shipping media with a drive that can't be used at it's rated speed?

 

[Doh!]

Deanodarlo,

Do you use Nero to burn? If you do, do yo have the smart-burn turned off? It's different from the buffer underrun protection. With smart-burn turned on, Nero will adjust the burning speed to the quality/spec of a media so that you won't have any coasters from burning too fast.

 

[Deanodarlo]

Smart burn is enabled and says the media is 48x compatible. I also have the latest firmware for the drive. The media has 52x stamped on the disk, but I have to reduce it to 40x for a safe result. 🙁

Smart burn only seems partially useful. 🙁 If you have a poor batch of media it can get the speed wrong.

 

[Doh!]

I was getting errors with the latest firmware & found out that other users were experiencing the same at cdfreak.net. I ended up going back to 6s0a version (I think the latest is 6s0d). I still get 1% or less errors once in a while when checking w/ Nero Speed but as long as it's readable, it's ok for me (I guess it's the price I have to pay for using cheap media). But far less errors with the 6s0a version than the latest firmware. Additionally, I don't know which brand you use, but with me when using high-quality media (Taiyo Yuden or certain Korean brands - I forgot the name), I get no errors at maximum speed.

I don't think the burning speed is really the cause of the errors since all errors are at the end of the disk regardless of whether I burn at 24x or 52x. Again, the burned disks are fully functional but shows few errors in Nero Speed disk scan. I think it might be worth for me to spend a few bucks more for higher quality media.