Thanks, Neph. I think alot of you, too. I have learned much, from your posts. @sghost I did not call you an idiot. I merely said that your statement about Plextors being crap, was idiotic, which it was.
Hi all I came to this forum as I was looking for feedback PX 716A and had noticed in another that Flip 218 had this model. As always, rather than start a new thread, I searched for the 716A & bingo here I am. Can I also say that I always come to AD in rather a humble way as my knowledge is so poor and so many people seem so keen to help me - for nothing - other than to feed back on progress & perhaps even discover something which I can share with everone. Having said all that, even I have bad days, and when I feel I have no time to apply critical thinking to a situation, I often get frustrated & regret my actions. It takes a big man/woman to accept an apology but an even bigger one to offer an apology. Perhaps 'Best is the Enemy of Better' Kindest regards to all Joeymac
I had nothing but good luck with mine but its a 712A and wild77 i had to wait forever to on the rebate so i called them about it and gotit in a week so try that.
i dont feel i owe grandpa an apology if anything he owes me one i have a right to voice my opinion on a product which i found as well as many others found faulty.everyone on here has given me there unbiased or biased opinion but without insults...and those i can accept.but i will not be insulted because of my unfortunate exper.with a faulty product,you say you were not trying to insult me but yet you apologized so i will take as though you were not thinking before you typed your responce therefore i accept your apology and give one in return too you and all i have offended in here NOW LET'S GET BACK TO BURNING!!!
I almost bought the latest Pioneer, but the tray configuration won't allow me to install it in my Vaio case. The drawer appears to be the whole top half of the unit, not just the middle like most other CD/DVD drives.
Sorry about the above comment, I replied to something on page one. On the 716A subject, I keep promising myself that I'll install mine - but the Sony Vaio case takes a brain surgeon's skills to get access to the drives. I did it once and it took a VERY long, frustrating time. One side of the bay doesn't even have access to the screw holes on the drives, so it just uses pressure points to hold the drives in on that side. It's liquid cooled and it looks sexy, but next time I guess I'll build my own! My Plextor unit is a t0203 from Best Buy. rzinstar - I plan on having the 716A as the master and my old Sony DRU-700A as the slave. Does this present a problem based on your comments about a non-Plextor drive being on the same chain?
robtwilk From my knowledge with CD Drives, my understanding is not to stream on the same IDE, any other advice out there? Deep Joy! Joeymac
The only problem that I have found when mixing the Plextor with another brand DVD burner on the same IDE cable was that the Plextor update program failed to work. By unhooking the non Plextor drive the program worked flawlesly. This may be a problem if you do not have easy acess to the back of the drives.You could split the drives onto seperate IDE cables, or cheat and just use two Plextor drives. Hopefully updates will start to be more infrequent. (The reason I went with matched drives was that I noticed that my old drive was ATA-3 and the new 716a's were ATA-5.This may explain part of the boost in speed.) Enjoy whatever drive you like best.
riznstar I appreciate your reply, I have a Plextor 116A drive as a DVD read drive + + a LG 52 Cd on the same IDE, withn the Plextor 708A doing the writing, it works no problem but as you say use what ever works for you. P.S. Any sign of Scuba Pete?
A senior member of the forums had mentioned I should have them on separate IDE's, but my hard drive is on the other IDE and I need that secondary cable for the additional hard drive I'm going to add. It seems that I saw someone's Device Manager with no hard drives on either IDE (primary or secondary). I'm new to the whole IDE thing, so I'm looking to absorb more knowledge. My drive is a 250GB Ultra ATA/100 7200. How else are HDs connected if not on one of the IDE cables?
Sata, is that super ata? I suppose that's very different than ultra ata? As for the PCI raid card I'm guessing I would need an open expansion slot for that? I have none! All three PCI slots are taken. Unless I have other options, I'm going to give it a try on the same IDE and cross my fingers.
serial versus parallel. ... suppose to be much faster and uses much much thinner cables. I have an SATA WD Raptor at 10000rpm and it screams, "Very Fast".
Well I do have an open PCI slot (physically), but I know Sony told me it was disabled due to some other card or something like that. Good news is that one of my PCI slots is just for my modem, which I don't use at this time. Can you tell me more about the PCI RAID cards? Are they used for disk arrays? I'm familiar with servers having RAID.
I believe its ATA133 vs SATA150. A 10,000 RPM HD will make a difference on either type, especially with at least 8MB. There are still some issues out there on boot drives under SATA. Even here on aD there have been many posts on that. Make sure you know what you are doing before just adding a card and a drive. Because of MB chips with Independent Device Timings and DMA instead of PIO, you can have both a Newer HD and a Newer DVD on the same 80 wire IDE cable. It isn't like the old days that a faster HD would slow down to the lower of the two, such as a CD-Rom or DVD-Rom.
There are different flavors of controller cards. The standard cards simply add another 2-4 IDE connections whereas the RAID cards give you the extra connections plus the ability to run a RAID array. If all you want to do is add more drives this is a simple and inexpensive card: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-102-002&depa=1
Also several of the Maxtor HD's come with/include a PCI card already and are ATA-133. I even thought that they also have a SATA card now with their SATA drives, but I could be mistaken on that. Edit: Maxtor does offer a combo PCI card, with both SATA and ATA-133 together.
I think at this point I need to get the inexpensive PCI card to support the other burner. I'm guessing based on your comments if I got a SATA card and drive, it would be the master drive. That would mean reinstalling ALL of my software, activating it, upgrading it, etc. Can you mix SATA with Ultra ATA? And thanks for all your suggestions and support!