Background:
I bought an NEC 3500 to put in a USB/Firewire external enclosure. The internal enclosure chipset was not setting the proper DMA mode for the drive resulting in a performance bottleneck. So I ordered a new external enclosure with another chipset. Here are the results.

Test Notes:
Using Windows XP Service Pack 2. NEC firmware is version 2C8 SE. All read and write tests were run using Taiyo Yuden T02 8X DVD+R media purchased from www.rima.com . Read benchmarks were used with the TY T02 disc burned at 8x. Here is the enclosure, based on the Prolific PL3507 chipset: http://www.dealsonic.com/stpmblsmbaco2.html

First I tested the unit right out of the box, USB and Firewire Ports, both read and write capabilities. Then I upgraded the enclosure firmware to the 09/07/2004 version as provided by Beach-Hobo and hosted by Minchin. I noticed the Firewire 16X burn was a bit choppy on the new firmware, so I ran a transfer rate read on the disc and got the error you see. I then rebooted and tried a 16X write and read again.

I would say my initial conclusions are I can now get a clean maximum 16x read on Single Layer media but only a maximum 12X clean burn. Comments, questions, and suggestions to improve the situation are surely welcome.