Thanks for the link midland45. I too took the plunge and updated the firmware giving me a shiny new liteon DVDRW !!! However tried burning my first 4x disk (an ICE) and guess what still burns at 2x Back to the drawing board......will buy some cheapo DVD-R's tomorrow and report back with any success. Cheers David
Great find there! Il try put my drive to a liton later tonight il post the results using my Ritek Go4 media.
Ok well I started the hacked firmware it requested to restart the PC, when the PC nearly got to windows still a black screen showing the firmware updater apeared! I continued from there but got a message saying write head mode 6 failed. I tyred this 3 times but never got into windows fully to start the firmware it always started it self before windows had fully booted. So no go for me? (Win98se)
Another example of the lack of quality control on the Bigpockets 49p DVD+R. You can see the finger of faulty dye pointing to where nero gave up writing. http://www.mariegriffiths.co.uk/BIGPOCKETSrubbish.jpg
anyone know what CD's the DW-U10A likes? made two beer mats out of imation cd-r 16x 700mb last night using Nero? Thinking about it liking ritek dvd-r's with a purple die, the imation's seem to have a green dye, anyone help?
My drive as far as CDR media goes is fine with traxdata, silver top no branded, Infiniti pro. havent tryed any more as yet but burns ok. as for the speed well its not burning at 24x more like 16x again nero still showing wrong speed. Iv tryed to contact ebuyer to send my drive back and still no reply after 4 days? The overall performance of my drive dont come close to the spec as avatised. Sony should try to keep its good rep name by not producing drives like this, good and bad batches.
I bought it from ebuyer too (uk), I was wondering to send it back but I have past the delay I think ( 1 week ?). Tecy: The Liteon upgrade did not work on urs so? u gave up?
As promised some feedback on my journey around the firmware trail with my lovely Sony (Liteon) burner. Well in desperation I took a chance and upgraded my firmware to Liteon and all went well. I then popped down to the local pc shop and bought 4 different brands of 4x DVDs as follows: 1x No name white top (Grade a)DVD-R 1x Arita DVD+R 3x One DVD-R 1x Bulkpaq Orange (DVD-R) Quietly confident I burnt the noname disc first and watched eagerly as nero showed 4x burning during lead in then.....2x for the rest of the burn. Never mind on to the One disc and my second burn.....no point in building this up...2x again. Then the Bulkpaq and guess what 2x.....Finally the Arita and success. Managed to burn this one at between 3.5 and 3.9x so some improvement there. Thinking it may be the firmware I went back to the DRU-500a 2.0f firmware and burnt another One DVD-R at 2x and then to cap it all I went back to the original firmware DW-U10a 1.1c and as expected the last of my DVD-R One discs burnt at 2x. Frankly I am totally fed up with this drive and will be contacting my supplier asking for a full refund even though I have had it for a few months now. TO cap it all, my neighbour has just bought an NEC DVD Writer for £99 and has zero problems with media at 4x so lessson learned I think !! Hope this helps some of you out there. Cheers David
I have formatted my HD this WE and put the DRu500a 1.0d firmware, installed nero 5.5.10.50 and for the first it burnt a DVD-R 4x princo(bulkpaq orange) in 15.40 mn. Will try another DVD-R and a DVD+R Datawrite tomorrow.
Yep I gave up on this drive! I was hoping that I could uodate it to a liton which in it self makes me realy mad that I should even have to do such a thing. Iv put a review on ebuyer uk 2 times and they have not posted it, maybe it would hold back on their sales? Any hell its going back mite get the poineer 106 or the litone as iv had good use of my liton CDRW.
After flashing to the Liteon f/w have tested the following.... DVD- BulkPaq Orange 4x .... Burned 4x.. 4.38Gb time 16m12s DVD- DataWrite Red 4x ..... Failed Burn never even got to 1%(Maybe this was just a crap disc) DVD- DataWrite Red 4x ..... Burned 4x.. 4.38Gb time 16m14s. During burning with Nero6 the indicated writing speed flickered between 3.7 and 3.9 each time. Think this goes to prove that it is Sony's f/w at fault.
As you say the firmware is at fault so being that sony dont offer any support for the OEM drives it leaves the user at no other choice to use hacked firmware. Mind you when I rang sony and posed that I had a 500A drive they still didnt help saying they cant offer any Guarantee that it will write at 4x with any software other than bundled with the drive.
I'm able to burn Memorex 4X DVD+R consistently at 4X (around 15 mins. ea.) -- no problems -- after I flashed my Sony drive to DRU-500A 2.0f from DW-U10A. I guess the problems encountered in this forum occur for generic disks. I hope we don't blame it all on the drive. The disks may be to blame.
nordstadt what about DVD-Rs had any luck with them? When I got my drive I looked around and it seemed that Ritek are a recomended media so I got Ritek GO4 branded 4x. My local computer shop recomended these disk also and have had every burn done on many drives at 4x, apart from they have no sony drives. If the Liton drive is any way as good as the 24x CDRW drive then it will be a very good drive. Iv had my Liton for over a year of heavy use and still burns every disk full speed not 1 coaster and reads very quick still to this day._X_X_X_X_X_[small]Dan.[/small]
Well iv managed to update my drive with the hacked Liton firmware using win 2k. Using the same media as before Datawrite 4X DVD-R it done a whole 4.34gig in 24:29 min, not quite 15 min but better than 33 min witn 500a firmware. Should have just got the damm liton! still mite!
tecy, tried burning my first two ritek DVD-R g04's with nero 5, but it stopped after 1%, claiming a SCSI error? I don't have any SCSI! do you think some of the DW-U10A's probs can come from Nero reacting badly to other installed burning progs such as DVD Decrypter? Sony DW-U10A Dated June 2003 Firmware v1.1d does anyone know the address for firmware updates and the prog for reversing the firmware back to original if req?, sure i've read it in this thread someware?
I've had the Sony DWU10A drive since June and only had trouble burning to Datawrite -RW disks. This was due to the media being duff. i've managed to burn X4 speed on both DataWrite Classic Redtop and BulkPaq Orange -R discs with no problems ( 'cos I'm a tightarse ). However, using Nero V6, I noticed on some of the films I copied (usually 50 minutes into the film) the picture would start to jump and the lip-sync would be out by about a second. After reading about this on various sites, I now burn films using CloneDVD ( after ripping with DVD Shrink ) without any problems and still at X4 speed. Nothing wrong with the drive/firmware, still original v1.1d. Hope this helps. Using XP PRO, Athlon1700xp, 526Mb mem.
Bassett, thanx, used nero 5 cos it came with the drive, and noticed it was mentioned alot on this site, have done 2 films onto Memorex DVD+RW 2.4X to test my decrypting, and they seem to play OK, quality seems V/good, but then yesterday it did not loike the ritek DVD-R's at all, and began acting funny, Nero "In CD" when packet writing other DVD-RW's. mate of mine said Nero does act funny with some other progs, suggested burning with DVD Decrypter, thought the Sony might prefer DVD+R to -R, always used Easy CD Creator in the past, with my old phillips cd-rw, need something for packet writing, might try Easy CD instead, Using W98SE on a P4 with 512MB, could be W98 causing probs, its on a fairly clean image, using it suits my present multi-booting set-up, WXP probly works better, Imaging saves a lot of bother! Might try Nero on its own, on a fresh image, nothing else installed, Thought about trying different brands, but do not want to waste the 25 Ritek DVD-R's, thanx for the info,
Im using win98se and have found rip times longer using DVDsrink. Win2k was faster by 30 min using the same software. Iv used Nero all version with loads of other Burning sofware and never have any problems, only thing that did happen was that when I 1st used my CD writer it was a little slow I then use clonecd and was quicker now its been quicker ever since even in nero? Im about to try a Bulkpaq G4 dvd+r tonight keep you updated._X_X_X_X_X_[small]Dan.[/small]
Ok well thats sum up what I have done to get my sony writer to burn at 4x. Upgraded to win 2k and now using Nero 6, Updated my drive with hacked Liton firmware only worked with win 2k not win98se. Used Datawrite G4 DVD-R and got a 24:29 min burn. Tryed Bulkpaq 4X G4 DVD+R again using nero 6 burned in 16:01 min "result" at last. Plays fine in my Sony DVPNS330 stand alone DVD player._X_X_X_X_X_[small]Dan.[/small]
