Problems putting a NEW Drive in an OLD External firewire box?

[phase52001]

I have a very old external firewire connectable DVD burner with a Pioneer DVR-A03 drive in it.
As replacement drives are pretty cheap these days I purchased an LG GSA-H55N drive to replace the A03.
Swapping the drives was straight forward and simple.

Burning CD-R and DVD-RWs works fine, no problems; however not so with DVD-Rs or DVD+RWs. Either the burn won't start or the burn won't complete after writing the leadout. It just stops.

I put the A03 back in and tested various formats. They all work, except that they write at 1 or 2X of course.

Would I be right in assuming that the firewire to ide interface is simply unable to deal with the later technology of the faster burning drive?

At this point I'm thinking of putting the A03 back in and keeping the LG as a spare for my internal dvd drive. (Been through 3 of them in the last 8 years).

Thoughts/opinions welcome.

[redwudz]

I sort of doubt that FireWire is the problem, but anything is possible. Did you set the jumpers on the new drive to Master? I'm assuming a IDE (PATA) drive because you say the box is old. SATA and PATA optical drives operate with a fairly slow data transfer rate, 33 to 66MB's second, if I recall correctly, and that's well within the transfer rate of a FireWire or or a USB interface.

[gll99]

I wonder how many times this has actually happened? I ask because if the sample is small it may not be a media issue but rather a connectivity problem. The cable may be loose or it may be the way the drive is balanced.

If it is a media issue then it might be brand specific and trying another brand might solve the problem.

I don't like to knock any company because of just my own issues which might be explained by other factors but I have 2 LG writer/drives (8x and 16x) and I liked the LG4163b at first but I'm no longer a big fan. In my limited experience I found mine could be finicky with certain media and speeds causing misreads of even perfectly good pressed discs and about 2-5% bad burns (Verbatim 16x) mostly for no apparent reason. I was beginning to think this was a fact of life with faster DVD media. I now have a sata Liteon iHAS120 on my other system it has yet to burn a coaster nor have I found a disc it couldn't read.

I was looking for the same LG you have but they were out of stock and I was offered the Liteon at a similar price. At first, I had my doubts but it's won me over.

[phase52001]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

I've printed off a copy and will go through it later when I have a chance.
I'll follow up with some more testing and get back to you.