Dear Joerg,

Based on your experiences, I would have probably also thrown in the towel after trying 2 drives in a row which appeared to be defective.

Regarding disc compatibility, we use Verbatim in our test lab as a sort of reference and also Taiyo Yuden and all the other wellknown media (Ritek, CMC, Ricoh, Mitsubishi Chemical (MCC)) have all been supported from day 1, so it puzzles me to see that you couldn't get any of the discs working properly. To find out, I'd really have to take a look at those drives and test them, but that's too late now.

The other thing that struck me as being peculiar is the fact that your system gave an error message during startup. Can I ask which mainboard you are using and whether there were any other devices present on the (secondary ?) IDE port to which the DRW1004 was attached ?

Regarding the DRW1008, you've probably seen the news on the CDFreaks newssite, you'll find them in stores by the end of november. It can write at 8X. Currently, only DVD+R 8X media are available. Our R&D is not able to test any DVD-R 8X simply because they don't exist. However, the drive is capable of writing at that speed, so by the time DVD-R 8X comes out (last I heard was that they might become available around february 2004), a simple firmware upgrade will probably all that is needed to support them.

Marco
BTC Europe Support