jon2121 - Well I just tried turning SMART off and placing it on the second chain as slave and it refuses to read dvd-r discs...

I might have just been grasping at straws I guess but its better to try and fail than to not try and then discover it was something simple that was wrong all along.

I would vote for incorrect bios setting if not for the fact that I have had 2 other drives made by different companies work just fine there. I had an NEC rebrand work fine and currently a Memorex, i forget what it really is, work fine.

I'd try moving it to the first chain and putting more work into it, but at this point I really don't care. It will take me more effort than I want to put into to move and reroute cables (as I sit here and try to think of ways to do it easier) to try it on the primary chain.

I'm going to keep looking for an external case that will let me use the SH-S182D as an external drive and get up to a 16x burn out of it... And hopefully I might even discover a drive in the next batch of new ones to appear that will work with my system.

Hope springs eternal, but I do know the next drive I try will NOT be a samsung if I can help it...

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that the drive worked when connected on the same ide port as an nec nd-3550d. Have your tried connecting yours with another optical drive yet? I'm curious to see if that works on someone else's machine.

I forgot to mention this in my previous post.

I used the wrong term when I said incorrect bios setting. That implies that the problem is with the bios and not the drive. I should have said incompatible bios setting.

There is no doubt the problem is with the drive. Ideally we, the user, could change a bios setting that would make the drive work and not impair some other needed or desired function (I.E. SMART).

Official SB03 released:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=200800

jon2121 - would you imagine that... I put the SH-S182D in the box as master and the memorex as slave and it works... I should also note its on a 40 wire ribbon for this round of testing rather than my 80 wire rounded cables...

It made a disc and then was able to read it, and the memorex could read it as well. And then I made a disc in the memorex and the 182d could read it...

Now this would be good news if I hadn't just had to give up 250 gigs of drive space to make 1 burner work like it should have in the first place.

I'm going to try to set the hard drive as slave and add it back into the mix and see if it works better this time... my hopes aren't to high but it would be nice to have this burner working like it should have from day one.

Ok... with a hard drive as slave the machine locked up trying to create a disc at all.

So I am left with these ideas....

If your SH-S182D drive will not create useable DVD-R media -
1. Try the SB04 CFE or newer firmware.

If you still get unuseable burns, you might have a "problem" chipset.
1. If possible move the drive onto an IDE chain with another optical drive.
The limited testing we've tried shows it will not work with another hard drive on the chain or alone on a chain with a problem chipset. You might get a different result, if you do... please let us know and post what chipset.

2. If possible return the drive and try a different drive thats NOT a SH-S182D.

3. Look into an external case, make sure the case you get says its designed for at least 16x BURNERS not just 16x DVD Drive. You will be limited to around 4x burns if you don't.

4. Gamble it all on Samsung addressing the problem and releasing a new firmware that finally solves the DVD-R issue as well as the chipset incompatibility. Bide your time only using DVD+R media and gloat how much better it is than DVD-R...

5. Buy a whole new computer just to make 1 piece of hardware work...
You can send me all your old machines, I will give them good homes.

As always your mileage may vary and if it does vary PLEASE let us know.
The more information in the pool lets us think of new solutions and werid things to try.
I do belive we will draw the line at sacrificing small animals to a dark god to make the drive work however.

A couple of options for the harddrive that allow you to leave the optical drives on the same controller:

If your board has sata ports, you can get a sata-ide adapter. If not, get a pci ide raid controller. If you look around, you can find either one on Ebay for less than $10.

I've got 2 different sata controllers to pick from. Just hadn't considered the option of a sata to ide adapter.

The problem I am seeing right now is a large pronounced delay in system response when moving things around on the drives. The only difference is the SH-S182D being in the machine.

This supports the idea that there is an incompatibility with certain chipsets, if you give it a chain all to itself, with another optical drive, it works, but at the expense of some system performance. Hurm...

Ok Sonys solution was to force the controller to work in PIO mode only...
I just looked up what modes the drives were in and my hard drives are UDMA mode 6, and both optical drives are in UDMA mode 2.

Can anyone running without a problem tell me what UDMA mode their SH-S182D is running in?
I think I remeber from a trial with the Sony version it was in UDMA mode 4...

What if the incompatibility is in the speed allowed to the UDMA setting...

hurm...

well at minimum this is giving me new ideas to pursue while I wait for Samsung to fix the world...

With all the installing and moving around you have done, you will have a lot of hardware gunk in the registry. Download the HP utility below. You can remove unused hardware just like in win98 safe mode. Unlike safe mode, it shows you whether "the device is working properly or "the device not connected".
HP System Diagnostics Utility

Also, does your board have an AMI bios. All five boards I tested with an Award bios had no problem. The boards that didn't work had an AMI, Phoenix or AMD (turion laptop) bios. Phoenix also makes the Award bios, but it is not the same thing.

This is by no means conclusive, since I only checked a couple of AMI boards. Comparing an Award and AMI bios to find a culprit setting is difficult. One has settings the other doesn't and the shared settings are often in different places.

But I do have an AWARD Bios....
So I think this leads more towards chipset problems...

What drivers were you using for the IDE controllers?
I'm on the default windows drivers for mine...
I had tried the Nvidia optimised drivers, but I switched back.

I've gone thru and removed unused devices from the device manager before when I was looking for solutions.

Who knows we might figure out the problem yet...

UDMA Mode 2 for the SH-S182D (the Litey on the same channel is UDMA4).

Edit: Default M$ IDE drivers.

No problem whatsoever.

I'm not sure it's the Drive

i have a Nec 3550A and it's cant read what its writing Under windows
im talking about DVD +R cd's .
but when i burned Windows Vista beta On a dvd and load it at Boot from CD
the DVD read the CD and was able to install.

after windows showed up it back to say the CD is empy which is not.

thanks for the firmware Jan! I just got around to flashing it and no more long leadin! getting awesome burns on TYG02

just one small question/request....is there any chance of getting an "extra special cdfreaks" FW with riplock removed

ZetLAW - If it were a windows problem, I would think more of us would be having problems than are.

But might as well pursue the idea, because we never know...

I'm running XP Pro and a 64x2 4800+ with the other socket not the new AM2 thingy...

I'd laugh if all of us having problems all had x2 old socket chips, and that somehow was the problem...

I have a Samsung 182D SB04 (CDFreaks Edition) as slave and LiteOn 165P6S as master on a NForce 4 Sli socket 939 with no problems at all.

Default MS drivers.

jbv - could I ask for 1 small favor?
Would you be willing to put the SH-S182D on the IDE chain alone as master and see if your able to read and write a DVD-R?
The disc according to current thinking should be unreadable by the drive when its alone on the IDE chain, and should have problems reading other DVD-R's created with other drives.
You will most likely end up with a trendy coaster, but it would add some more data to the pool of information we have.
We have the same chipset and if yours behaves the same way mine did, its more than just an isolated problem.
I wish I could think of a better way to see if this is a problem with the drive itself, or with different chipsets. We've found failures on different chipsets and configurations, and success for some people on different chipsets and setups.

Anyone have any ideas why a drive would malfunction when its on an IDE chain by itself or with a hard drive but works fine when its paired with another optical drive?

Have you tried with both the native mobo drivers and MS drivers?

Installed my 182D as master and single drive at secondary ide channel.

Read and write no problem.

I use NVidia S-ATA drivers and MS P-ATA drivers.

ExpertTech - I had tried the Nvidia Pata drivers in the past and disliked how it operated so I switched back to the MS drivers... I might give it another shot to see if it makes a difference for me.

jbv - Thank you for trying that. I'm surprised that your results were good, but happy that you don't suffer with the same problem I have.

I wonder if it might have to do with manufacterer location or date the drive was built now... wouldn't be unheard of that someone somewhere ran out of widget a and switched to widget b that does the same thing but operates differently on some level.

Ok so I'm going to go make sure I have all the latest drivers again and try the Nvidia Pata driver vs the MS default driver. Just noticed CompUSA has the Mad Dog rebrand of the drive on sale again... Might try another one, see if I can find a different manufacter date/location and see results...

So I was digging thru Gigabytes website and one of the faq questions struck me as odd...

It related to not being able to use the 2nd IDE chain...

"FAQ
Why can't I use the IDE 2?

Please refer to the user manual and check whether you have connected any cable that is not provided with the motherboard package to the USB Over Current pin in the Front USB Panel. If the cable is your own cable, please remove it from this pin and do not connect any of your own cables to it "


I am going to try to find some time to go into the case and unhook my front panel USB cables and see if there is a difference... I find it odd that they might not be "standard" cables but it never hurts to try.

nforce3 mb here. switching to ms drivers did the trick. thanks!

Ok making some progress...

Disconnected the front USB cable, did another round of clean the device drivers, and found the patin coffiun (sp) and ezplay driver that VSO (BlindWrite/ConvertXtoDVD) uses - uninstalled the software, I had forgotten all about those drivers being installed with the programs.

I managed to get 2 burns made with the drive solo on the secondary chain, only disconnected the power to the 2nd Optical drive for the testing, and both discs worked. It was also able to read previously made discs as well...

Next up is trying to add the Hard Drive back to the chain and see the result.

I'm hoping it might have just been the patin coffuin driver... I'd hate to give up my front USB ports... And hopefully when I reinstall the software the problem will not reappear... but once I do it, I'll be here posting my results.

jon2121 & jbv - if your still following the progress here 1 small question if I might.
Are you running any virtual drives - ie DaemonTools, Alcohol, Slysoft Virtual Drive?
any other tools, utilities like AnyDVD, RegionFree, etc?
any VSO products, BlindWrite, ConvertXtoDVD etc...?

I have hope that we are about to find "THE" solution for people who might share this problem...

Pandasattack - Thank you for posting your success!
It adds another solution for people who are looking for a solution for their problem.
As I remeber the Nvidia Pata drivers say they are not required, they are just optimized to lower the demand on system resources...

Another Big Thank You to everyone whos been posting information and suggestions.
There is alot of information in this thread now, and a few of us still having problems are getting there. Its cool that people who have working drives take the time to help the few of us who are still having problems. Hopefully everything we've found so far helps someone else quickly and shows them they aren't stuck with a problem alone and to keep hope that there will be a solution for them. I mean it worked for Pandasattack and who knows how many other people who didn't post when it worked for them.

On a side note I ran the Nero CD Speed 4.7 over the burns I was able to produce...
Quality score of nonexistant... it started at 40 and went downhill from there, might this just be a problem with the software and drive?
I do know that Nero had blocked using this drive for testing, google + registry edit and you can test with it, but maybe they had a good reason for not letting it being used for testing... but I lack trust with Nero, everytime I install it I make a point of not associating it with any file types and everytime it changes all the file associations to work with Nero.

I can read the information fine still, but I see people posting their scores, so in a moment of noobness I ask the question... is the score that important?
My current vote is no as I am testing a commerically pressed disc and its score was 50 and falling...

Mr. Man & jon2121: I've got the same problem, I guess... SH-S182M SB03 CDFE

I actually tried putting the drive on the same IDE chain with my old cdrw burner and it didn't work - I still wasn't able to read any of the dvd-rs I tried. That old wretch runs in a 'Multi-Word DMA Mode 2', unlike most of the newer burners running in Ultra DMA. Tomorrow, I'm going to try putting it together with some newer drives.

Well, adding a NEC 3540A to the ide chain didn't help... and a clean reinstall of WXP didn't solve this problem either...

Old firmware (SB00 and SB01 for the M variant) didn't help.

I tried the writer in another computer and it worked perfectly-single on a secondary IDE chain. Funny thing is that both computers' mobos are based on nforce 2 (mine is Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe, the other one is ASRock K7NF2-RAID). Tried both the original ms IDE drivers and the nforce ones, to no avail... I wanted to try the drive in an external USB enclosure, but I think that would be pointless now-it would probably work. The thing that eats me is the fact that having another writer on the IDE chain with SH-S182M doesn't help me at all.

EDIT: Do we know whether this is a windows-related problem? It might be interesting to try reading DVD-Rs in another OS, i.e. other versions of Windows (the two computers I tried it on were running XP) or some Linux distro... or just burning some bootable DVD-R and try to boot from it. My drive is already packed in its retail box for RMA.