does samsung make a good cd writer?

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canton_kid
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Post by canton_kid »

WHy would you think the burner was bad if the disk works after burning? That's like end of the trail for the burner, job done, it worked! Anything afterwards I would think would be disk or damage related when it stops working!

I use the cheapest disks I can get, and never had one just go bad so far. Some been ruined due to mis-use and abuse. I'm sure it can happen, but still don't think it would be the burners fault! Once the dye is burned in and the disk works the burner doesn't do anything else!

My Lite-on burners have been better than my Sony or Memorex burners!! Memorex had to be RMA'd just a few months old, Sony won't read now in wifes system. Just found out, she never uses it! So it's only a month or so older than My oldest Lite-on and has less than half the use but is dead!

Made some coasters with Mem and Sony, not with Lite-on. Better everything! AND much cheaper!!

16x DVD drive, I never had problems niether has my 11yr old girl, we both have one in our systems. The lite-on drive plays any disk we throw at it! Comercail CD or DVD, DVD -r, CDr, CDrw, data, Mp3, Vcd,
plays everything! Does it as well or better than our standalone set top DVD player!
I have a toshiba DVD -r -rw burner, when I burn a useable -rw disk the Lite-on plays it!
My only problem is user error (not hardware), can't author my dvd's the way I want them very well yet.

If Lite-on doesn't have that firmware upgrade, it is probably because you shouldn't need it :)
I can't think of any type of disk My 16x DVD drive cannot play!! I have played them all, and all formats work! The R/Rw cds have been burned with Memorex/sony/lite-on burners that I have owned. Disks burned with all 3 brands of burners work fine! Disks are anything from 4x up to 42x. I never bought any 52x disks yet :)
Even the cheap Princo DVD -rw disks play well! Those few I did get burned correctly!

I've been installing these Lite-ons for friends too and they aren't having any problems either.
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Judg3
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Post by Judg3 »

heheh FP.

Ya know, we probably have the opposite opinions on a lot of things, but only because of our backgrounds. Your's is mainly consumer based, whereas for 3-4 years all I dealt with is server grade hardware. Hell, I used to pay extra to get those Samsung and Fujitsu scsi drives, because they ran quieter, faster, and cooler then anything out there. I absolutely LOVE COmpaq and (to a lesser degree) HP servers, and so on and so forth.

We should get together for a beer. How bout you come up to Madison, WI this weekend? ;-P
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knightofnee1112
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Post by knightofnee1112 »

Flying penguin, compaq also uses lite-on cdrom drives :-D Liteon is great. I own a Liteon 52X and a 8X8X32 samsung cd-r/rw It's been nothing but good to me, kicks out the CD's fast enough (8 minutes or so per cd) it's quite too. the liteon i have to say, I'm not as satisfyed with, but it's a good drive too. But i wouldn't buy it from wall mart, those jerks can screw anything up, I bought mafia from wall mart and it was missing the 3rd cd! I perchased a n64 game a long time ago, and the damn game was smashed to hell, even thought he box was fine. wall mart sells crap. I segest you go elsewere and pay a tad more, http://www.newegg.com probably can kick the snot out of wallmart prices anyway.

Judg3 you have to admit, the home class products Hp and compaq produce are nothing but piles of *()&%#)$&!!! They are very poorly constructed, poorly built, and poorly thought out specwize. Most of the time compaq constructs it's PCs from generic parts or whatever the lowest bidder is. Quantum hard drives. ECS equivilent motherboards, passive cooling, under powering generic PSUs. they are crap! I'll shut my trap about the enterprise class stuff, I've not experence with them, I hope they are ok.
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Judg3
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Post by Judg3 »

Yeah Ill admit COmpaq's home stuff is crap, I used to tech support for em like 5-8 years ago. Whoa the stupidity of installing the BIOS on a special partition on the hard drive hehe

Their enterprise stuff rocks though. I absolutley love it. High quality, well built, and lot's of freebie stuff - such as Compaq Insight Manager, which emailed me when anything went wrong on any of the servers or workstations.

We're talking anything! I've gotten an email from it because the +12v rail on one of the power supplies wasn't returning a consistant value and fluctuating to much. No one else does this, not Dell, not Gateway, not HP, no one. hehe

(Well, x86 side, never played with Alpha and friends!)
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Post by Jim Z »

WHy would you think the burner was bad if the disk works after burning? That's like end of the trail for the burner, job done, it worked! Anything afterwards I would think would be disk or damage related when it stops working!
Blur rates. a cheap drive will blur the transitions from 0 to 1. The resulting burned disc is likely to degrade faster. So yes, the burner did its job, but it didn't do it very well.
My Lite-on burners have been better than my Sony or Memorex burners!!
Guess who makes Memorex burners? Lite-ON!
16x DVD drive, I never had problems niether has my 11yr old girl, we both have one in our systems.
well I'm happy for you.
If Lite-on doesn't have that firmware upgrade, it is probably because you shouldn't need it
So, you're telling me that I didn't need a firmware upgrade that just so happened to fix the problems I was having? Wow...
canton_kid
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Post by canton_kid »

Memorex is made by Lite-on?? I didn't know that. So even at that , the disks recorded by the Memorex/lite-on still work! And some of those are fairly old. The only bad disks are the ones with physical damage. Or never worked because of a bad burn and were coasters when taken out of the burner. Not ever been a problem with coaster since I got a Lite-on, course I have a faster bigger system, and buffer under run protection the sony and Memorex did not have. Had to RMA the memorex because it died, The one I got back never had any problems. Brother n law has it now, still working though an older slower drive.
That's ok though, he's an older slower brother n law :)
I bought several 16x DVD-ROM drives for various projects a few months back. These drives would choke on nearly every burned CD I'd put in them. Some would work, but only after the drives tried to read them for about 30 seconds. Most other media wouldn't read at all.


If a firmware upgrade fixed your problem, that's good you got it fixed. All I was saying is you probably should not have had that problem in the first place. For what ever reason??
What would not work in your drives??
Your drives didn't read those disks, mine reads everything! Did they use a different firmware on your 16xdvd than on mine maybe? Maybe you got a beta firmware :)
Mine are exactly as they came out of the retail box, no upgrades. One drive I have had many months (maybe a year, lost track) and I have one I bought just a few months ago. I have bought and installed a few for friends too at various times. I've only used a dozen or so personally, but they have all worked flawlessly with my disks. I know any I have installed are straight from the box. Any already installed on a system by some-one else I can't say if it was out of the box or upgraded. Knowing the owners I would geuss straight out of the box. But none ever failed to play a good disk.

Mine have played every disk ever thrown at them and that is every type I know of and never a problem! I love to burn disks :) I rip all the cd's my wife buys and burn them to Mp3 cds with tons of songs. She takes em to work and plays em in an Emerson MP3/CD player. She doesn't have to change a disk all night, they get trashed at work, I burn another. Never had one not play in the DVD drive.
Vcd's, data, disk copies, recordable, re-writeable, DVD -rw. I haven't burned a DVD-r yet, nothing I did as dvd I want to keep permenatly yet.

The ONLY DVD disk I ever could not play has been the Platinum Edition Snow White from Disney. I heard MS released some type of patch for the problem. I got around it by installing a patch that disabled macrovison detection for my Ati All in wonder video/capturecard. Now that disk plays on my system in the Lite-on DVD drive. So even that one disk was not a problem with the Lite-on drive but with the Disney DISK and the garbage copy protection on it!

Not many of my friends have burners, but I installed some Lite-on DVD 16x drives for them. Some of them had camcorder vhs tapes I captured and burned as VCDs, they can play those on their 16x DVD drives.

I'm sure out of the millions of drives they made there could be problems with some I haven't ran across in the few I played with. Maybe it's like the Norcent standalone DVD set top players, one model number has 3 versions of firmware, depends on the serial number you buy as to what it has.

But based on my experince with every disk of every type that I've made working correctly in many Lite-on 16x dvd drives, I would geuss an update should not be needed and that's why they don't have one :)

Although if it had to do with region codes I could see needing a patch. You can only change that supposedly 5 times then it locks, but that seems to be normal for most DVD players, even set tops although you can often find the code and set it to region zero for all regions.
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Jim Z
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Post by Jim Z »

What would not work in your drives??


Pretty much any CD-R, save for some old ones with dark green dye. I'd insert the disc, it's spin up, down, then up and down for about 20 seconds trying to read it, then give up. Trying to access the drive through Explorer gave me the "Please insert a disk" error.
If a firmware upgrade fixed your problem, that's good you got it fixed.
What you glossed over is that I couldn't get the firmware update from Lite-On or JLMS. They were ALL broken links. I had to get a hacked flasher and firmware from some guy who posts on CDRinfo.com in order to make it work. You go, Lite-On!!! Great customer service!!! :mad :

Oh, and for your information, the firmware for my drives isn't even listed on their site anymore. :rolleyes:
Not ever been a problem with coaster since I got a Lite-on,
The drive itself is the least likely cause of coasters.
Your drives didn't read those disks, mine reads everything!
As I said, good for you. Use them and be happy. I, however, will never buy nor recommend a drive made by them.
canton_kid
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Post by canton_kid »

I wonder how many drives they produced with that problem then? And if I'll even run across one?
I been buying nearly all drives from newegg and tcwo, oem on hard drives and retail boxed for CD burners and DVD drives.

Ocasionally I buy elsewhere when the mood or price strikes good.

Obviousily your drives are different than any I have come across as Lite-on 16x dvds. Course that's not all that many compared to what's made each day :)

I'm wondering if it's an old drive problem or a new one then? The ones I been playing with are from about a year old to a month or two, as far as purchased. Never checked date made on them though.
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