No 4X on Sony DRU-500A

[tomcoleman]

I have a Sony DRU-500A brought it when first come out. i have upgraded the firmwire to 2.0F and have it runn on Master drive everything seems to be set up correctly DMA and everything. brought Ritek 4X media and it wont burn at 4x, when i put the DVDR in it see's it as 4X media and goes to write at 4X but actually writes at 2X any suggestions to fix this problem........?

[Mr Zippy]

Yes, buy some good quality media.

Saying that whilst I had my DRU-500A the Riteks burned fine at 4x ie. 15 mins for a full disc.

It has been mentioned many times here that certain batches will not write at 4x.

Neil

[Mark_Venture]

my burner... Sony DRU-500A, purchased end of November or begining of December at Circuit City. Currenly upgraded to firmware 2.0e.

I was worried about buying media mail order because I've been reading about people having problems burning at 4X with princo and Ritek media. That it either cant burn faster than 2x or software says its burning at 4x but it still takes 30 to 45 minutes to burn.

I didn't know what media to buy for faster than 2.4x burning.

The first (and only) 4x media I bought is Verbatim +R 1-4x (reorder#94589). All burn fine. Takes aproximately 15 minutes to burn a FULL data DVD. and they cost about $2.00 per disc at Best Buy. (15 pack is $29.99) I burned more than 10 discs already, all at 4x.

[Bob W]

Your mistake was in updating the firmware. The DRU500A will burn Ritek and princo at 4x with the firmware it ships with (1.0e I believe). I know because I burned a hundred of them at 4x then after I updated the firmware that was the end of my 4x burning no matter what media I bought..

[rkr1958]

Your mistake was in updating the firmware.

I'm not so sure about that. A month or so ago I updated my DRU-500a from 1.0f to 2.0f. While the write speed on my Accu's went from 2x to 1x I'm not encountering significantly fewer errors especially in read back in my DVD-ROM drive. I had terrible luck with Fuji DVD+Rs before the upgrade but they work fine afterward. Also, the last batch of Accu's I bought (off of ebay) player poorly in my standalone DVD player (Toshiba SD2800) before but played great after the flash. So while you may loose burn speed my experience is that the upgrade to 2.0f improves media compatibility with both my standalone DVD player and my computer DVD-ROM drive.

[Bob W]

I never get any errors. That is true on my Sony DRU500A before it died and now the Sony DRU500ax I bought to replace it. I did however waste a few discs at first before I discovered I needed to put my DVD files into a VIDEO_TS folder if I wanted them to run on my DVD player.

[Artistimus]

just reporting

sony dru500a firmware 1.0f

ritek 4x media burns at 15min

[Roenberg]

Just reporting too:

No errors at all with DVD-R 4x. Have until now burned about 40 Princo @ 4x speed Newest batch.
It`s a Sony DW-U10A>DRU500A, 2.0e
But Princo DVD-RW 1-2x only works errorless with max 3,5 GB

[rossinator]

I'm in the same boat. I still can't burn any at 4x. Here are the brands I've tried in this order:

Memorex DVD-R 4x
Verbatim DVD+R 4x
Ritek DVD+R 4x (Product DVD02X0026) Thought this was sure to burn at 4x...

All burn around 30+ minutes.

Previous to trying 4x burns, I "upgraded" to 2.0F flash.

What am I doing wrong here? I've very frustrated with this drive.

Is it a master/slave issue? (not sure which is which on my system)

Shouldn't the Ritek burn at 4x?

Thanks,

Jim

[Gregg]

I bought my Sony DRU500AX from BB March this year. It came with 2.0c firmware and it burns -R/+R at 4X /15 min/ including the Riteks without any upgrades or flashes so far.

Enjoy!

[Jayhawk]

Same success here with Verbatim 1-4X. Paid $2.00 at best Buy and less at Microcenter. Sony 500AX with 2.0E (have upgrade but just haven't gotten around to it).

I also occassionally run across the "general Verbatim's" at a good price and they burn at 2.4X which is fine with me. Using Nero 10.28. Over 100 burns with no problems.

[rossinator]

I appreciate your positive experiences because they give me hope this problem can be resolved, but what tomcoleman and I are looking for is help with trouble-shooting our problem with slow burn speeds.

Any suggestions on what we might be doing wrong?

Thanks,

Jim

[dun4cheap]

I go revert all the time to previous fw. I have some ritek 4x, 1x and lead data 1x. If I am using FW 1.0G I can burn the ritek 4x at 4x, and the lead data burn at 2x and the ritek g3 burn at 2x.

[TBoneit]

I appreciate your positive experiences because they give me hope this problem can be resolved, but what tomcoleman and I are looking for is help with trouble-shooting our problem with slow burn speeds.

Any suggestions on what we might be doing wrong?

Thanks,

Jim

I will give the same answer others have given for what you are doing wrong!

For Tom: You are buying the wrong media!

I burn at 4X on TDK and Verbatims from best buy $2 for Verbatim 15 pack spindle & $1.89 for TDK 100 pack spindles.

The media makes a difference. I suspect (IMHO of course) that it says 4X burn because that is what the media says it is, however it is taking 2X time to burn because that is what it detects the media as capable of when it does its power calibration/test of the media.

Sorry Rossinator, I see you tried Verbatims... I'm using the 2.0f firmware and it works for me.

Have you checked to see what mode your drive is running in, DMA or PIO ?? PIO should be slower and could cause problem.

One other thing I've seen hooking a burner to a Promise controller card killed burn speed for the burner. I don't know how other brands would affect it.

Is the source drive running properly and on a different cable??

Is your computer fast enough?

Some things to think about and check.

Good Luck
Roger.

[Gazorgan]

I'd like to point out that if your DVDR drive isn't in DMA mode, it will probably only burn at 2x. It should be fast enough, but it never seems to work in PIO Mode 4. If you got a CDROM drive on the same channel, I bet you you aren't in DMA mode.

[rossinator]

Thanks Roger and Gazorgan. You've given me some stuff to check (when I get home from work...). I have my DVD drive on the same ribbon as my CDROM, so that could be the issue. I will check the DMA thing, too.

My computer is a P4 2.5gHz, 7200 harddrive(s), and 1 gig of fast RAM, so it's got to be my configuration.

Again thanks,

Jim

[rossinator]

I checked and found the following results:

My Sony DRU-500ax is the secondary drive with a CDROM as the master drive.

I checked CMOS and found the DRU-500ax has a PIO setting of 4 and an Ultra DMA setting of 2. Not sure what each should be.

Based on this info, what should I change?

Thanks again for your patience and help.

-Jim

[handyguy]

Try 4x Accus they are suggested for this drive but I use 1x accus which the 500a sees as 2x. meritline.com has a list of what media to use with what machine.
btw, that 2.4x sony dvdrw Igot with my 500a works for that rated speed, so yours should work that fast too.

[rossinator]

Changing the drive to ultra DMA did the trick. I now burn the Ritek 4x in about 15 minutes. I haven't tried any other media since I fixed the drive configuration. Thanks everybody for your help!

-Jim

[BCY]

rossinator:

What did you change to DMA? CMOS or in operatins system.
I have a 510A using Verbatim 4X. Cannot get it to write at 4X using copytodvd.

[zeppsstteerr]

A couple of things to think about also. It has been discussed in this forum before about using the 500A with Promise controllers and the problems that causes with 4x burning. Another issue is the VIA chipset on Athlon Motherboards. This can also cause issues. When you burn no matter what speed your CPU usage should be 1-8% max. If you are experiencing like 80-100% CPU usage you will not be able to burn at 4x speed no matter what media you use.

Food For Thought...

[atb]

For those who got VIA chipset with AMD motherboard should install VIA 4-in-1 drivers. Try it, it should make some difference!

[w00tski]

no its the actual firmware making the decision, considering that other decent brand 4x media works. As a few tests, i flashed back to 1.0d and the riteks burnt at 4x, but they did not work, ie readback was awful. Then i tried the burn again at 2x and the media worked fine. Its either the media not upto grade or the sony's just have a tough time burning on these disks. I tried princo, using 2.0f firmware, it burnt it at 4x, but again the readback was awful. Seems this burner wasnt designed with cheap 4x media in mind. I did try a verbatim 4x +R and it worked/readback fine. Considering the riteks work fine on the A05 i think there is something wrong with the burner itself.

[jorak]

Ummm....dunno what to tell you, but I'm burning RitekG04 with logo fine at 4x with my Sony with 2.0f firmware. Have done 3 so far with no problems, all 4.1 - 4.3 gig burns. I'm also running an AMD Athlon XP processor on a Via KT333 motherboard, burner running UDMA mode on the main board IDE ports instead of the RAID/ATA133 controller

[w00tski]

yep some people are reporting no problems, most are having problems thou though, a show of hands or a poll or something to get some sorta numbers would be a nice way i guess to see the extent of the 'problem'. The only real problem is this burner doesnt like to write at 4x on cheap/er media.
I remember one guy posting how they had ordered in 5 of these burners and only 2 of them worked 'fine' with any 4x media. Im curious as to whether the the DRU510A has this problem or not, is it a manufacturing defect. Very interested as to what is causing the burner to write at a lower speed etc. I wish sony would have some sort of input on this as all we have is speculation.

[TWiZDeD]

how do i set the burner to Ultra DMA mode? thanx for your help

[mrbass]

4X DVD+R burntime 14mins
4X DVD-R burntime 16mins
2.4X DVD+R burntime 22mins
2X DVD-R burntime 31mins

I bought four 20 packs of 4X TDK DVD+R and 14 mins to burn..couldn't be happier. In my isolated case DVD-R I will never buy again that's for sure. Work awesome on my sonydru500ax

[ewingr]

I'm considering updating to 2.0f, from 1.0f. What Rkr1958 says above makes sense. I've found that even if I can burn at 2X, they are more successful playing in DVD players if burned at 1X...although that experience may be based on useing DVDs that were only certified at 1X.

At any rate, my main problem with upgrading the firmware is that I have to uninstall all my Packet Writing software. What a pain. At least, according to the instructions.

Anyone have any experience of updating firmware w/o having to do that?

[Mark_Venture]

how do i set the burner to Ultra DMA mode? thanx for your help

Depends on your configuration... For me, and my setup, DMA mode was selected "automatically"...

My rig... (only necessary details given..)
Asus P4PE/LAN/1394/SATA motherboard, P4-2.66Ghz, 512Meg PC2700 Ram running WinXP Pro SP1
Primary IDE controller: MASTER = Sony DDU1621 (DVD-Rom)
Secondary IDE Controller: MASTER = Sony DRU500a w/2.0e firmware (DVD Burner)
Secondary IDE Controller: SLAVE = Philips 1208K (CD-RW)

Hard drives are two 18gig IBM 15K rpm scsi drives attached to Adaptec 2940U2W controller, and one Maxtor 60gig 7200 rpm IDE attached to the Promise Raid/UltraATA133/SATA150 controller also built into this motherboard. SO the hard drives are NOT connected to the same controllers or cables as the DVD and CD drives.

In CMOS, IDE "Hard drive types" for Primary and Secondary Master/Slave are set as AUTO. I did not manually select DMA mode vs PIO.

In Device manager, under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, I have Primary and Secondary IDE Channel listed. On Advanced Settings tab under Properties for each, TRANSFER MODE is set to DMA IF AVAILABLE. This results in "Current transfer mode" being listed as Ultra DMA Mode 2 for the DDU1621 and DRU500a, and Multi-Word DMA Mode 2 for the 1208K.

Watching CPU usage with Motherboard Monitor 5 while burning a DVD at 4x with Nero, results in about 5-10% cpu utilization with occasional spikes up to 15%.

[Bhola]

Go back and try 1.0f version. I am still running that older version and 4x media takes 15 minute. My burner is DRU-500Ul but shoule not make any difference. By the way you might know but here is where you will find all firmware (Older) www.sonydru500a.com -B