I own hp pavilion a264w, the main dvd/cd burner Hp 300c) finaly bit the big one (for burning dvds anyway). It seems to play movies and burn cds just fine. I removed the cd player that was in the lower secondary part of the cable and I moved the HP 300c to the lower secondary part of the cable and then installed the new Plextor 730A in the Master part of the cable. Both drives are jumpered up as cable select. 1st try to back up and it worked like a champ, whoo hooo. Real happy with it so far after backing up 3 movies. Question 1: Before the HP 300 was E drive and now after switching the drives around - the HP 300 still continues to be E drive and the new Plextor is the F drive. I guess it rely dont matter but is there option to change them around without messing with the Slave and Master jumpers? Question 2: This drive is 8X, the Hp 300c was 4x - I am using RiData 8X +R disks and the 3 backups I made seemed to work great. Whats everone do? Slow backup rate back down to 4x or backup using 8x? Question 3: Any other things I should know about operating this burner? My firmware is 1.01. I have not set up region code yet but looks like it dont need it, maybe because the software I am using removes region coding? Thanks for any help in these matters. RCCola, Toot Toot
With any of the newer burners, make sure that your cable is an 80 wire-40 pin cable, otherwise you won't get the Ultra DMA 4 throughput with the new burner.
Thanks for comment. I am pretty sure I have the new cable sence I was able to set both burners to cable select. I know the cable had 3 seperate colors that got plugged into everything.
That plextor 740 is a rebadged benq 1640. It should have 16x writing capabilities. 1) There should be a way,not sure how. 2) Ritek ridata: They should code as Ritek-R03 and very good media. Both my benq 1620s and 1640 love them. I go 8x with them. Wait till you get into the Verbatim +16x. They may actually scan better at the faster 8x and 12x speed,but the scans are worse with the 2.4x and 4x burns. Try them at 8x and make sure all your stand alone players/game consoles/and pc drives play them perfectly! 3) Your burner has the bittsetting capability called booktyping.This alters the plus format media,which you are already using,and turns it into the dvd-rom format. This helps out on compatability issues in case you run into a drive or 2 that won't recognize your plus backups. It's a very nice feature,but you'll probably have to use a program called plextools to set it up to booktype. 3)You should set your backups as region free just to be safe. What programs are you using? I use a lot of free ones and they are very good and high quality at that. Look at my sig. This is a 16x writer,you may want to set your plextor as the master,and then the HP as either slave or cable select.The master will be at the end of the ribbon,and slave- c/s will be in the middle.This may be why it tells you you only have max 8x burn speed.Some manufacturers may recommend the middle ide plus as slave,and others recommend c/s.Make sure it is 40 pin/80 wire cable.Hard to tell the difference,until you put them side by side.The 80 wire will have finer wires. These drives should fly at 16x speed,if you use the quality media like taiyo yuden and Verbatim. You may also be able to overburn the 8x speed media to 12x and 16x.That quality media will also prevent a lot of issues later. Not only successfully burning,but playback on those dreaded stand alone players.I rate those Ritek-r03 right up there with the ty and verbatim.
@saugmon do you know what NEC & BENQ recommend for the cable settings? @GrandpaBW i dont think all the new burners support Ultra DMA 4 my NEC-3550 & BENQ-1640 dont my old old LG GSA-4160B does i think that Ultra DMA 4 supports the DVD-RAM burners
Cable settings are usually specified by the manufacturer of the pc. I've got both my main and backup 3000+ athlon set as: Primary master for hard drive with O/S Primary slave for 200 gb maxtor hd Secondary Master as my read dvd-rw drives Sedondary slave for both my benqs. I've heard some manufactures will specify c/s instead of slaving them.A few members did have issues and fixed them after they switched them to c/s from slave-or vice versa. I can't remember which brands like HP/Dell/Compaq recommends which settings. My HP and my cousins HP works with the slave settings.I also set him up a 200 gb maxtor as a slave-but very odd mobo.His HP also had the lightscribe and pentium,but his tower was way different than mine. He had a red+black/small cable going to his mobo that ran from his main hd.Nothing close to a ribbon. Very odd looking,and didn't even look close to the Maxtor.He then had the 2 IDE sockets. I would have had to take everything out to place his IDE ribbon for the maxtor. His pc looks like it has room for 5 optical drives,but only a 250 w powersupply. I told him if he slapped anything else in there,to put at least a 400 w antec in there. I'm not much of a pc guru,but everything I know, I learned it here from ddp. I got UDMA 5 on my primary and UDMA 2 on my secondary.
To change your dirve letter assignment, right click on My Computer, select Manage, then select Disk Management. You should see all your drives listed. Click on the DVD drive you wish to change and then right click and select Change Drive Letter and Paths. To switch them you will first have to change one to something like H and then switch the remainder to D and E or however you want them to come up. (IE, change D to H, then change E to D, and then change H to E) This always worked for me.
Thanks all for replying. Got the drives letters changed around. I looked at the cable again and the one that come with the new Plextor drive was alot smaller wiring than the one that was inside already so I changed them out - got same responce as before. No change on the speed. I am using RiData +R 8x and that was the max that it would burn at. I normaly use Shink with Nero but last night I just backed up movie using Nero. It works but was thinking it might bump up to a faster speed but it didn't. RCCola
When you run out of those riteks,look for some japanese spindles of sony +1x-8x. They are also made by taiyo yuden. These babies will burn at 16x in both my benq 1620s.I have q-suite 2.0 on my main pc with the 1640. It controls the overburning of my media to the rated speed. I'll have to turn it off some time and see how fast it'll burn those sony tys. You'll be ok with the 8x speed.Very safe at 8x with these quality drives and using quality media. If you get time to pow around with that pc,you may try jumpering them to master and slave-or vice versa to see if you can get that speed up.
I never did load up the Plextor Tools from the CD that come with it - wonder if there might be something there for overburning the speed of the DVD?
I don't know about the overburning,but that cd has some pretty valuable uses. This program can set your drive to booktype the plus format into dvd-rom. This booktyping allows a higher percentage of your backups to be compatable on stand alone players. If you ever get this type of error: No disc/Dirty disc/Wrong region?Wrong format on a stand alone player/game console/or pc drive- Then try the plus format and booktype them. It's a huge compatability improvement for all 3 of my benqs. You may also have error scanning programs and other stuff on it.
