Right, I swapped out my old Pioneer 4x DVDRW earlier this year in favour of a BenQ DW1670. For a longer period of time I've noticed that my burns at 16x are taking too long, in fact it takes around 6:20 to complete a full single layer DVD at 16x. So, I installed ImgBurn, which shows real-time burn speeds and I noticed that the speeds fluctuates heavily. It starts off at 7.8x or so, then slowly climbs it's way up, which is all fine. But now and then it drops down to around 5x, and the unit cache drops to around 10%, it then quickly speeds up again to where it left. This seems to happen at the same places - always. I've tried 3 types of media, and I'm currently using Verbatim 16x discs. I've also updated to the newest firmware, and reformatted my PC. I've tried burning off both my raid 0 array and from my storage drives, and all drives are newly defragged.

I may also add that the discs seem to work ok-ish. My standalone DVD player has no problems reading the discs, but it's a very good reader. My parents LG player has problems with burns made on Epro discs, but I have not yet tried the Verbatim burns on that player. The Epro's work fine on the LG when they're burned with my Pioneer 4x unit.

The fact that it always seems to happen on the same spots, leads me to beleive that there's something going on with the burner.

Any tips or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Welcome to cdfreaks.

Don't think you should worry.
While here please read Wesociety's DW1670 priview, I'm sure many of your questions will be answered.

Thanks.

I think I should worry though, because the reading performance is, to put it nicely, shit:



ALL read tests look the same, no matter what discs I use. Even the discs burned by the Pioneer drive I know are in perfect shape look like this.

I just popped in a friends LiteOn SHW 160P6S, and the burns and reads are perfect. Therefore my conclusion is that there's something fundementally wrong with the BenQ drive.

Suppose I don't have any other choice than getting a new one then. Which one is recommended? I burn alot of discs, and "perfect" burns is very important to me.

How's the NEC AD-7173? I need some recommendations.

The reading issue is relating to newer versions of CD-DVD Speed. 4.51.1 performs TRTs correctly.

Having said that, I'm not impressed by either of my 1670's. As readers, with older CD-DVD Speed they show a perfect TRT, but when ripping anything, regardless of program, they are much slower and do not rip near their rated speed (for example, a SL rip that should take about 5 minutes takes about 8 1/2 minutes).

Burn quality is decent with these burners, though I don't like that they burn with fairly high jitter. And no 12x support without modifying the firmware with MCSE also is annoying (I now run a modified firmware that replaced all 16x support with 12x support).

All in all it's a mediocre burner by the standards of recent burners, and an embarassment to Benq fans with their past burners (ignoring the DQ60).

Not a fan of recent NEC burners. If you can find one, the Benq 1640, 1650, and 1655 are all excellent burners (the 1620 is very good as well and you can buy it at zipzoomfly.com). Beyond that, I'd say LG 22, Liteon 160P6S, Liteon 165P6S, Pioneer 111D.

Alright, thanks for your reply.

What do you think is causing the unstable writing speeds though? Is this common for this drive? I think it's most weird.

As for drives, I have the LiteOn 160P6S (flashed Sony DW-Q120A) in my system right now. It's my mates, but he doesn't want it and offered to me for a cheap price. It does seem to create better results on my cheap Epro discs than the BenQ. On the other hand I ran some tests on the Verbatim DVD-R discs with Kprobe burned with the BenQ, and the results looked good. Though I'm no expert in interpreting these graphs.

Also, I can't seem to find any older versions of CD-DVD speed. Is it hosted anywhere? And why isn't these problems occuring on the LiteOn DVDRW?

I cannot find any of the older BenQ's in my area (Norway). What would you suggest me do to? Keep the BenQ AND the LiteOn?

Thanks for the help.