Pioneer 106D rip speed

[4smiley20]

Over the past few weeks I've noticed my rip speed really diminish. Lately I've only been able to rip at about 2.1x but this morning when I used decrypter to rip I couldn't get over 1x. I can't seem to figure out for sure what's causing this and was hoping I could get some ideas here. I've flashed the drive with the latest firmware and I've made sure that the ide channels are operating in dma mode.

One suggestion I've seen in another forum is to make sure that your drives are defragged. I have an 30G internal drive which my OS is installed on and a 160G external drive which I normally use to store movies that I'm working with. I tried defragging both of these drives and noticed that there are still a lot of fragmented files that remain untouched after defrag is complete. This happens on both drives. Anyhow I was hoping to get some ideas here before I decide to reformat these things in hopes that that will fix my problem. I will probably take me about a week just to get everything burned onto cds and dvds so I'd like to avoid reformatting. Thanks in advance for any help.

[jimmalenko]

Defrag a couple of times until there are no fragmented files whatsoever.

[4smiley20]

Thats exactly what I tried to do. Each drive I tried defragging several times. When defrag would finish I would run the analysis again and windows would tell me that the drive still needs to be defragged and show a bunch of those red fragmented files. I did this over and over until when I ran defrag it would complete in about 10 seconds. So thats where I'm at pretty much. Defrag won't seem to clean up the rest of the fragmented files and i guess my question is is that slowing down my rip speed so much?

[Gregg]

If you have DVD folders/movies on the hard drive defragging is waste of time. Better uninstall the IDE drivers and restart. This will usually solve the problem.

Enjoy!

[jimmalenko]

If continued defragging does not fully defragment all files, I'm afraid you might have to consider reformatting the drive. Copy everything off it and reformat. This might not be the easiest way, but it will definitely fix the problem. You really only need to reformat your external drive.

[4smiley20]

Well I finally finished cleaning up my hard drives and it didn't help my rip speed at all. Now I'm thinking that the problem is with my firmware. I've flashed the updated firmware twice now but for some reason I don't think its working quite right. When I did this the drive changed to the 106D from whatever it was called before that, A06U i think. However the rip speed is still stuck at 2.1x and from what I've heard thats the rip speed limit with the original firmware version. Is there a trick to getting that updated firmware to work? Do I need to reinstall the drive after I flashed the firmware in order to get faster rip speeds? Any help would be appreciated.

[jimmalenko]

I think you are making it sound harder than it is to get everything set up properly.

Over the past few weeks I've noticed my rip speed really diminish. Lately I've only been able to rip at about 2.1x but this morning when I used decrypter to rip I couldn't get over 1x.

To me that implies that you had been ripping above 2.1X at some stage. If you have been using your Pioneer 106 all along, wouldn't that tell you that the firmware was OK because you had been ripping at a speed greater than the standard restriction ? And if so, why the hell did you stuff around with the firmware ?

Reformat your Hard Drive and be done it with it. A re-install will fix almost any problem as long as it isn't physically hardware-related. Either that or spend $50 AUD and buy a dedicated ripping DVD-ROM. I believe that for preservation you should only use your burner to burn.

[4smiley20]

I hadn't really been paying attention to my rip speed before just recently. I had been just using shrink to transcode off the disc and backup that way. Lately I've been under some time constraints and have just been using decrypter to rip to the hard drive and worry about transcoding when I have free time. So I'm assuming I've never been able to get above the 2.1x limit. After reformatting I got the speed back up to 2.1x from 1x it had dropped to. I know I should probably be using a rom drive to rip but right now I'm more concerned with getting this burner working as it should. If anyone has had a similar problem and could shed some useful advice I would appreciate it.

[jimmalenko]

If time is an issue, get a ROM. It will be much much quicker and will probably rip quicker anyway by the time you sort out the firmware upgrade. Unauthorised firmware upgrades void your warranty too.