Sony DRU-500A ripping speed faster than 2.0 ??

[simpledisc_bv]

As most owners of the Sony DRU-500A burner have already experienced, the ripping speed of this burner is really terrible, only 2x.
Therefore I was very surprised that I ripped a DVD this morning, and I saw the speed increasing from 2.0 to 7.4 during the ripping process.
The movie was not encrypted, but I'm sure I have ripped other DVD's that were not encrypted, and the speed did not exceed 2.0 !

Does anyone have an explanation for this? Other DVD's that I tried, and that were encrypted, did not go faster than 2.0.

I have firmware 1.0f.
I also heard that 1.0g brings no improvement in this matter. Therefore I did not update the firmware yet.

Regards,
Jan
NL-Wageningen

[SaSi]

Let my try to help by example.

I recently downgraded my system from WinXP to Win2K. The reasons are irrelevant but once the PC was reconfigured, most optimization settings were gone).

The first time I ripped a DVD, on the Pioneer DVD-ROM (116), speed was terrible also (0.8 ~ 1.8). I enabled DMA for the drive (was in PIO mode) and ripping speed jumped to X8 ~ X13.

I also tried this on the SONY. There was no way I could increase ripping speed from the solidly stable X2.0. The fact that the speed is so rigidly X2 makes me suspect that the drive is faking it (pretending to be slow) for ripping.

The Sony firmware upgrade says it will enhance reading performance on recordable DVDs but nothing for pre-pressed ones. (However it says it will enable the drive to write @ x4 on DVD+R(W)s. I haven't got any such media, so will not hurry to upgrade the f/w.

In the meantime, I still use my DVD-ROM for ripping.