Watch out for Liteon 812s and Ritek +RWs.

[chas0039]

Well I never expected this. I was burning a Ritek +RW Ricoh W11 in a Liteon 812S and I got a absolutely terrible burn that was beyond readable. I figured that the only media my 812 would still burn well was now off the list when I decided to do some testing to see what had happened. I had previously scanned these discs in this drive and had really good burns with PI errors in the teens. I was now getting burns with scans in the 200-300s and beyond. I tried USOQ, VS0E, and a number of the codeguy’s firmware and found no real difference; crap burns. They I had a thought and figured it out. When I make the first burn on a new disc, the quality is great. When I do a second burn I get crap. I now have switched all my burning to NEC and I thought I would warn you. It may be just my drive, but watch out. This problem does not surface on my NEC; I have my great burns back even on re-writing. They sucked me in with the great first scans and I never thought to check re-burn quality. Good thing I can still do scanning.

[chas0039]

ADDED:

Well, here is my latest theory. I reset the learning on my 812Sand went to burn 4 more +RWs in a row. This time I used old discs that had already been burned. The first burn was moderately bad but no where near as bad as beore. By the 4th burn I was back into the teens on my PI scans.

I am guessing that the problem lies in Liteon's learning memory. When I first used these RWs they were all new and unused. These are what Liteon learned and stored in memory. My guess is that once burned RW discs are different from new RWs and they must be burned differently. Conserquently, Liteon does poorly with used RWs when it has learned to burn these from new discs. Since NEC does equally well with either my guess would be that they learn on the fly each time. I could be wrong but it makes sense.