DVD Drives

One thing that is puzzling me is I have written a DVD+RW (TDK) on a Sony Optiac burner and another data DVD+RW (Verbatim) on the same Sony Burner. I have retired the burner and replaced it with an LG Blue Ray burner but it wont read the TDK disc burnt on the Sony but will read the Verbatim disc. So I tried another TDK disc on the LG Burner and it writes and reads fine.

I took the offending TDK disc that the LG wouldn't read and tried it on another Sony burner and it reads fine.

Any ideas? Both burnt with K3b in Linux.

Was the disc finalized (closed) properly after burning?

Yes took about a minute to close/finalize. I am thinking the Sony just prefers it's own written discs.

Probably.

I have a USB LG DVD Writer here and an older Sony SATA Blu-Ray drive. The sony wont read DVD-RW discs burned with the LG but will read other RW discs burned with another older IDE DVD Burner I have. They can just be a bit finicky for some reason :\

Have a feeling the Verbatim discs are far superior to the TDK discs, both +RW.

I just watched a random YT video with a guy testing how many times he could write and erase a DVD-RW. The specs say up to 100 but he got about 17 i think it was.

Google is watching me... I reply to this thread and that video comes up on my feed.. hmmmm xD

Edited by Seansmit17 (Fri 23-May-25 22:31:21)

Not a lot is it? Perhaps I have written to it too many times although can still read from it. Good old spies at Google.

I watched the same video, pretty interesting and amazing how many scratches gets onto the disk just by putting it in and out of the drive.

I have some Blu-ray disks that I formatted so they can be used like a USB stick, just pull files onto them, I formatted them with the LG drive in my PC, but they won't work on the Asus external drive, I can read them via the LG, but for some reason the LG is not writing to any Blueray, which is why I got the external drive as I can also use it with my Mac.

I got some more Blu-ray rewritable disks called Media range, they seem to be okay and a good price.

Don't forget that the disks in the video, were new, old stock, so could have been stored for a few years.

i remember in the early days of CD writing, when my mate and me for that matter had a SCSI Yamaha drive, and we used gold disks, useless, they were, after a few months the gold started to flake off the top. Thankfully, the technology got better pretty quick and drives got faster, writing CD at single speed was not fun, certainly if you had a few of them.

I remember the old 233 writing disks for him to send his music out. I miss those days.

I still use optical, mainly Blu-ray these days, but still a few CDs.

The external Asus drive is a strange thing, i think it is a laptop drive stuck into a case

https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/optical...

I'm so old..

I remember going from a 2x CD-R creative drive to a 52x Lite-on of some sort... the speed difference was insane back then!

Apparently there's a 72x drive out there somewhere.

My LG USB drive is also just a laptop drive in a case.

I'm so old..

It's all relative. I remember loading 8" floppies into the mainframe to do backups - people on here will almost certainly remember using punch cards...

Yup...

My first CD-writer was a Yamaha SCSI single speed drive, my mate got one to put his music onto CD as he had a small studio and was a singer/songwriter. I remember we used Adaptec SCSI controllers and the pain to get them working, no plug and pray.
I don't remember what I had next, no doubt some PATA drive.

I am confused, I got myself an external Blu-ray writer because the on in my PC stopped writing to Blu-rays, well I thought I would give it another go a couple of days ago and it is now working
Oh well, the external drive is useful for the MAC.

I'm so old I remember using pencil and paper.

I remember using that as well, never had computers at school, did not even have a calculator. Had to use our brains. MMmm, not sure what happened there then, because it certainly did not help me.

Anyway, it is strange how much everything changed and pretty quickly,

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

I'm so old I remember using pencil and paper.

Ah, the joys of manually extracting square roots

Ah, Heron's method. Remarkably accurate after just a few iterations. But I confess that I would prefer one of those wind-up mechanical calculators rather than just pencil and paper. Such a lovely clack-clacking sound. That brings back memories of my undergraduate days with a room full of those at full song in the numerical methods class.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Ah, Heron's method. Remarkably accurate after just a few iterations.

For some reason my main memory from school is of the digit-by-digit method that looked a bit like long division... somewhat tedious, and heaven help you if you mis-read (or wrote) a digit, but it was nice to see the answer build up in front of you

Uni was mostly slide rules, for electrical engineering they were usually close enough

I missed out on mechanical calculators, at work we went straight from slide rules/tables to the electronic jobs. And not the basic 4-function ones either, we had a beauty (for the time)... I think it was one of these.

eta- just noticed it's displaying the square root of 2

Edited by billford (Wed 18-Jun-25 14:25:02)

And numbers like 1.414, 1.728, 2.236 and 3.14159 were etched on your brain . . . .

Not so much the third one (didn't often need it), but you missed out 2.71828...

Edited by billford (Wed 18-Jun-25 16:00:17)

Definitely the most memorable, IMO, because of it’s part in Euler’s identity, surely the most beautiful of equations. Although I have a soft spot for 1.414… as the proof of its irrationality was the defining inspiration for my love of mathematics.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Euler’s identity, surely the most beautiful of equations.

Yes; that you can take unity, two transcendental numbers and an imaginary number and combine them so simply to sum to zero I still find mind-boggling... it shows there has to be some order underlying the universe somewhere

Remember using a hand punch to produce these cards. Had to memorise the Hollerith codes and had to write what the characters were (or supposed to be) across the top.

Edited by gomezz (Fri 20-Jun-25 11:12:15)

There is also a similar method for hand-calculating cube roots but I never got the hang of that.

I think I remember the maths teacher telling us that the method could, in principle, be extended to any (integer) root, but above the square root it rapidly got out of hand.

(And we'd probably never use it anyway- if you really did need a reasonably accurate higher root, expose yourself to the joys of seven figure log tables )