Sony DRU500A owners

[Benzima]

My Sony DRU 500A unit should be here tomorrow. I read almost every post I can concerning it here. I wanna make sure I don't miss anything.

Here's my current system:

Case: Pentium 4 IN-WIN Full tower
Power supply: Enermax 465-VE
CPU: Pentium 4 (478 pin) 2.4GHz Retail, generic heatsink and fan
Motherboard: Abit TH7 II ( No RAID, thought about it, but decided against it)
System Memory: 512MB = 256MB (X2) RAMBUS 800MHz ECC
Hard Drives: IBM 40G DeskStar 7200 RPM ATA100 (IDE1 Master) I may connect an 80 Maxtor 8MB 7200 RPM as a slave on IDE1
CDRW: LiteOn 4812W latest firmware (IDE2 Master)
DVD: LiteOn 16X LTD-163 (IDE2 Slave)
Floppy drive: Sony 1.44M 3.5"FDD
Video card: Sapphire (ATI) Radeon 9700 Pro
Sound card: SB Live! 5.1
Network card: 3Com Etherlink 10/100 PCI Network Interface Card with 3XP Processor
Cable Modem: Linksys BEFCUM10 version 2
Router: Linksys BEFSR41
Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer
Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro
Monitor: Sony 24" GDM-W900
Game Controllers: Saitek U36 Flight control system
Act Labs Force RS Steering Wheel
Operating system: Windows XP Pro (Corporate version)
Printer/Scanner/Copier: Epson 2500

Home theater DVD player: Sony DVP-9000ES
Play Station 2: SCPH 39001 / 97004

I'll be adding the DRU500A tomorrow. First, should I remove the Lite-on DVD 1163 drive or the Lite CRDW 48X burner, or both? Should the DRU500A be the master on IDE2 alone or should I connect the Lite-on DVD or CDRW as the slave on IDE2.

After I install it, should I upgrade to 10f right away? When I upgrade I have to have the DMA disabled, right? Will it be disabled by default? How will I disable/enable it before/afterwards? For s/w I already have Blindwrite 4.2.5 and Nero 5.5.9.17. I plan to install DVDXcopy 1.2.2. Should I even bother with Recordnow? I want to copy/backup regular DVDs and make some PS2 games? Will I need a modchip for PS2 DVD game back ups?

I got Accu 50 DVD-R with cases.

Any other steps I shoulds consider or perfrom? Thanxxx in advance for any ideas

[rkr1958]

I certainly understand your excitement. I received my Sony DRU-500a last Saturday. If you take a look at my profile you'll see that my computer is less powerful than yours but I'd been happy with its video editing, encoding, authoring and now burning to DVD performance. I've even been successful in playing a home DVD movie in my standalone Toshiba SD2800 player. Anyway, here is what I did (BTW, I'm running Windows 98 SE).

1.) Before DRU-500a, two hard-drives, DVD-ROM and CD-RW. Each drive is master and connected to it's own IDE controller (i.e., channel). I added two additional IDE channels via a PCI card.

2.) I replaced my CD-RW drive with the Sony DRU-500a. The CD-RW drive was connected via the PCI card. However, I swith the DVD-ROM to an IDE controller on the PCI card and connected the DRU-500a to the secondary controller channel aboard my motherboard. All four drives are still master and connected to their own IDE channel.

3) Booted up my system, W98SE recognized the DRU-500a and I verified it was working by playing a little bit a Star Wars.

4) When I booted up I kept all of my USB, parallel (i.e., zip drive), serial (i.e., joystick) and firewire devices unhooked. I then killed all unnecessary processes which left explorer and one or two additional processes running. In my windows configuration I'm unable to disable DMA. I flashed the firmware to 1.0f. This went fine but W98SE hung on re-boot. I did a manual reboot and everything was fine. [If your worried about DMA, one suggestion I got was to do the firmware ungrade in Safe Mode].

5) I hooked up all of my hardware devices (e.g., USB, ect.) and loaded MyDVD and RecordNow and proceeded to burn DVDs (DVD+RW, DVD+R and DVD-R). I found that DVD+R will NOT play in my Toshiba but DVD-R will. This alone was worth the wait for a DVD write that wrote both formats.

6) So far, I've been extremely happly with the burner.