I've been asking for a lot of help lately and figured I'd post what went wrong in hope to help some other people. My main problem was that immediately or shortly after I began a burning cycle I would receive an I/O error and some type of Semaphore timeout. It turns out that the combination of my OS (windows XP) and USB 2.0 was not compatible with my external burner. Maybe everyone here knew this, but I had to do a lot of searching to find this… Sure enough, I successfully burned a movie and CD on my parent’s computer which is USB 1, I have USB 2. I tried the same exact burns on the computer in my room and got the error. So to make a long story short after a week of trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I took back my external mad dog burner and plan on getting an internal sometime this week. Any suggestions? I’m looking at… http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827151136 It’s the same as the mad dog external except it’s less than half price and internal.
Thats a good drive but for $6 more IMO this drive is better http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827106045 Now days though most drives are going to work well the LiteOn is just a more dependable drive IMO. Drives I have or have owned (I will just list the Manufactures as I have had to many models to list) This is the order I would rate them LiteOn - Mainly for dependibility and price Pioneer Plextor - These are great, but for price LiteOn is just as good NEC Samsung BusLink Sony ASUS - The jury is still out on this one HP Right now I am using an ASUS DRW1608 P3S, but I can already tell I don't like it as well as my LiteOn's. All of these companies make decent drives I can't really say any of them are junk, but I can say with a good consious that the LiteOn's have been the best threw the years for me. Good luck with your new drive PS it is always better to go for the internal drive vs. the external drive if you can (they work better)
Thanks for the advice man. Yeah I'm definately going for the internal, especially after what I went through with that Mad Dog.
Make sure you don't burn faster than 8x and not slower than 4x for movies mad dog burners are fast! Maybe too fast for movies.
