I have now had my drive for about 3 hours and for the life of me could not work out why I was getting problems. This may help to show you what is going on. BTW this is from a clean install of XP (did have XP64 but got fed up with all the programs I could not use) and the only thing loaded is drivers for display etc & CDSpeed.

The first 2 pics are burstspeed, 1st firewire and 2nd is USB2 speeds.

The 2nd two pictures are burns onto MMC 004 16x media. 1st is firewire & 2nd is USB2.

Comments please.

It does look like it is a bug in the controller chip / Firmware as I swear I can hit 16x with standard BSOB firmware on my 1640 using Firewire (I will do a scan in a few mins to see how it goes). Its also odd how firewire cannot hit 12x but USB2 can.

@qwakrz,

I currently also have a ReBadged I/O Magic (DW1655) drive and my Firewire Burn & Burst Rate are attached...

I have had nothing but trouble with BenQ drives over the past few years, starting with the 800A and now the 1655 with external cases !!!

See my thread about "Prolific & Recode" in the BenQ forum. Recode & CloneDVD2 have problems with Firewire but run great on USB2 on the 1640.

On the 1655 the failure is in both Firewire & USB2 but in different places.

If you notice most of the other ODD drives work fine with the same firmware internally or externally. BenQ always has to have a special version of the firmware. Prolific must be pulling their hair out trying to adapt their IDE Bridge Firmware to work with BenQ all the time...

I am really starting to believe that if you must have an external you should look elsewhere. Just make sure the UDMA is mode 4 !!!

Just my option...