Recently bought one of these to replace my aging 106 and by god i wish i had went with a cheaper manufacturer now.
It all started with my 106 burning loads of coasters with some x8 media Bulpaq so i decided on the 109 and installed it and it burned the Bulpaq x8 lovelly and at x8 but i was having massive troubles with the 109 reading Original Dvds so decided to flash the frimware from 1.17 to the newest which was 1.57 ,now im lucky if i can get the write speed above x3.3 and the device buffer is alwasy fluctuating between 100% and 0% (never did this before the Flash),ive actually tried Flashing back to 1.17 but with no joy ,so any suggestions how to remedy this or should i just try to RMA the Drive ?

Check the mode of your IDE ports. Frequently, flashing will confuse Windows and it will reset your port to PIO mode. Set it back to UDMA mode.

Your a star checked my ata settings and the 109 was set Properly to udma but my HD was running in PIO mode ( when i installed the 109 i did move the hd ) changed it to proper settings and its burning at x8 again ,funny thing is i was close to buying a new hd as it was kind of chugging a bit lol