Much Ado About Everything

More hardware problems for me! Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be. If you were changing hardware and software in your machine(s) as often as I do, you would run into problems too! But I seem to be running into them far too often, and they are far too obscure – so isn’t that getting a bit too much?

Let’s see… A few weeks ago my Plextor PX-716A CD/DVD burner died (or did it? – play along with me for a while). Upon inserting a blank or recorded disc of any type, except a commercial pressed DVD, the drive would spin up and down trying to read and would invariably fail, freezing my machine in the process (if I waited 5 minutes, it would give up and release lock, maybe). After many reboots and a few firware upgrades and downgrades, I decided to pronounce it officially dead. Oh well, I thought, it’s a Plextor, those have long warranties, two or three years. Right? Wrong!! One year! Only! And mine was – naturally – 2 or 3 months over the limit. Figures.

And with that I have my first issue: a self-proclaimed “King of Quality” offers the same warranty as other manufacturers? I know it used to be longer than that. Do they not have confidence in their drives any longer? Have manufacturers in their ongoing anti-consumer crusade managed to push laws so far that they can now claim such titles without any
justification? Oh, never mind. No amount of whining would help me back up my data so I had no choice but to buy another drive.

But what drive? I realized that I really did get a good value for my money
when I bought Plextor. The drive cost a fair bit of money, somewhere around $160 (plus 15% taxes of course) which was more than double the price of quite literally any other drive on market that is not Plextor. The drive had total of 9 firmware upgrades in less than a year and they not only improved media compatibility but have also added features (-DL burning) and increased supported speeds! This is pretty uncommon to receive so I was quite impressed. As far as support for existing customers, Plextor easily ranks the best of all companies in this
business, at least if I’m to judge by firmware updates. It’s sad that what they’re doing is not considered the norm, but that’s how it is.

Fast forward to May 2006 – PX-716A still costs $160! But the competition has steadily fallen in price and can be now had for as little as $40 dollars, with majority of drives between $40 and $50. We are talking more than 3 times the difference in price!! So now I had to think hard – and fast – about whether I would get another Plextor. On one hand the ability to scan burned discs to ascertain their quality turned out to be very important to me, as did Plextor’s ability to burn on just about anything. On the other hand, cheap burners produce just as good burns – if not better – than any Plextor, according to authorative reviews. At 3 times less the price! And given that my last Plextor died in only 14 months, I figured I couldn’t trust its reliability any more than I could trust any other manufacturer. After all, it’s made in China, just like anything else, and it carries the same warranty as anything else – there was not a single indication (price does not count!) that the drive would outlast its cheaper competitors.

After reading many reviews I decided to buy BENQ 1655, which was also on sale at the time for $59. It’s a bit more expensive because it features Lightscribe but since it was on sale its price was within striking range of other competitors so I got it anyway. Later I found out that 1650 is identical except lack of Lightscribe, but it wasn’t on sale then; today, it is, for $40, and I might’ve gotten that one instead, but then was then and now is now (what a difference one week makes, eh?). Anyhow this drive is also supposed to be capable of running quality scans.

Once I got it however, I found out the quality scan (QScan) utility isn’t all that fancy, and its tests are fairly simplistic. However they are fast and they do give you a rough guess at whether you can burn a disc at a certain speed or not, so I suppose they’d be good enough for most users. But then a week later I found out about the existence of Nero CDSpeed utility which allows for detailed measurements a la PlexTools, meaning PIE, PIO etc. and that my new BENQ drive is one of (the few) supported ones. After seeing what the utility looked and performed like, I concluded that had I known this I wouldn’t have even considered another Plextor.

In the last few weeks I only burned a few discs. I should mention that I sometimes burn temporary discs – to be used in a DVD player once and then typically discarded – which makes sense for time shifting. One could say that it’d be better to use rewritables for such tasks but they are only 4X and that takes forever (15+ minutes) to burn, and time is something I
hate to waste if I don’t have to. There exists 8X RW media but it is very difficult to find, impossible unless you go to a highly specialized online blank media store; and even then it’s hard to find. Anyway, I use Memorex 16X -R discs for that; they suck but I got them
cheap, or rather, I got them in exchange for another batch of discs (actually, Memorex 16X +R, or perhaps 8X +R, but Memorex +R at any rate) which worked much better in my friend’s burner. I mean, I did some friends a favour by exchanging blank media, because I got Plextor which burns even those Memorex (which are CMC 3 media type) decently. Not great,
maybe not even good, but still pretty decent, at 8X anyhow. Well, BENQ utility also said that it can be used only at 8X but at 16X it showed it getting out of specs only at the
very end of the disc. So I figured, as long as it’s not a full disc, it should be fine. Right?

Wrong!! But of course! When does anything ever go right when I’m involved? So these crappy Memorex 16X -R’s, which are made by CMC magnetics, well known for crappy media (people dispute that of course, it’d be more correct to say very inconsistent instead of crappy), didn’t work well at 16X even when not full. I’m not sure why, perhaps because they
were at the bottom of the stack, but they failed during the burn. Two of them in sequence. Not before I burned a bunch of them without any apparent errors, however. After scanning previously burned ones, I found out they were no good, even though they did not fail during the burn itself.

But how did I test in the first place? By googling and finding out about Nero CD/DVD speed – already on my system, unknowingly. But while I was testing these discs, I decided to scan some older previously burned discs, in order to do a comparison to what I remember my old Plextor used to produce. And then I discovered something really shocking and disturbing.

Now now, calm down, we are talking about DVDs, so shocking and disturbing must be taken in that context. Which is: the highest rated (without doubt) media on market, Taiyo Yuden, and the highest rated burner on the market (disputable but not controversial), Plextor 716A, produced some really bad results, so bad that the disc was unreadable in BENQ 1655!

Whoa, now wait a minute. Since I recall doing scans way back then, I know these worked very well together. I immediately suspected my BENQ or Nero CD DVD speed rather than the disc itself. I put it in my other machine with LG 63B, and while that one does not support
the full gamut of tests, I was at least able to run a transfer rate test as well as surface scan test and they came out ok. Another reason not to suspect media and Plextor, right? So I started poking around on specialized forums such as cdfreaks.com to see if I can
get any leads on my problem.

Now, I haven’t yet discarded my “bad” Plextor; it was sitting above my kitchen sink, ready to be thrown to trash for two weeks, but somehow never made it to the garbage bag. As I was reading through posts, I encountered some where people had similar problems with their Plextors, and managed to “fix” them by cleaning the drive’s insides.

Nothing to lose, right? I opened my Plextor – trivially easy to do – fired up the vacum cleaner and let it loose, only making sure to be gentle on the lens. There wasn’t really much dust and lint inside, but there was some. Perhaps it was in the way of the rail mechanism? Who knows. I put the drive together and inserted it into the machine. Or rather, I let it lean to the (out)side of the machine, only connecting it to the ATAPI cable and the power cable. Poor thing looked gutted, as I removed its bezel in order to have it cleaned and I didn’t want to put it back just yet. It was leaning at an angle, barely touching the floor and being held up by the cables.

This time when I inserted a blank disc, it did not freeze. I didn’t quite know what to do so I started up the Nero CD/DVD speed and let it burn a test disc. I was expecting it to freeze immediately.

But… it didn’t. It seemed to burn a disc just fine. I took it out, scanned it in BENQ, it looked fine as well! Now wait a minute, what the hell just happened? This drive was supposed to be dead, no?

Usually only bad things happen to me. Plextor ressurection didn’t look so bad to me! I nstalled Plextools, rebooted, and rescanned the disc I just burned. It looked nice and clean, just like when Plextor was working fine. So the drive was not broken. But why did it fail in the first place? Did cleaning really help?

I inserted the TY02 (Taiyo Yuden) disc I had problems with into Plextor and scanned it. The scan wasn’t very good. It was in fact awful. While it didn’t produce any fatal errors, unlike on BENQ, the amount of errors and the general trends aligned pretty well with what BENQ scan reported. So while one could argue that BENQ should have better error correction and not fail to read this disc, it was also clear that the disc was in bad shape.

At this point I decided to put Plextor back in my system, but leave BENQ in as well. I put a new faceplate on Plextor – a black one, perhaps to mark its rebirth from death – and installed it into a new drive bay.

This time however the machine would hang at boot! If I disconnect Plextor, it’d work, but otherwise, it behaved just like when it originally “died”. At this point I immediately suspected the ATAPI cable. While I was fairly sure I fiddled with the cable when it first “died” without any success – if I threw Plextor out without at least trying that, I would deserve to get all those problems… wait a minute, no, I would not. But I couldn’t consider myself an expert in computer hardware if I threw out something that still works perfectly well. Anyhow, this time I decided to replace the cable rather than just unplug-replug. I did so, and the machine booted right up, and the drive was now working fine again. So, my original problem was with the ATAPI cable, not the drive! This wasn’t too weird because the cable wasn’t your normal cable, but a rounded one, with plenty of exposed tiny wires around the connectors due to the way it was constructed. It’d be pretty easy to have them damaged, and even if not, it’d be easy for
interference and crosstalk to seep in. I threw it away (straight to garbage this time) and I’ll have to get another round cable – of better quality, like the one in my other machine – because flat ones block the airflow too much for my taste, especially in a badly routed machine like mines usually end up.

So now that Plextor has been exonorated, I was left with ascertaining what happened to Taiyo Yuden media. I tested a few more discs with varying results, eventually finding total of 8 discs burned around the same time (3 week time span in August 2005) that were bad, while the rest were good. Scans of all bad discs were similar, which couldn’t have happened if their “badness” was due to dust or scratches or fingerprints. No, either media was bad or something happened to the burner during that time. Interestingly, these bad discs could still be read in either Plextor or LG 4163B, but BENQ refused to read them.

First I suspected it was due to firmware change. But I found out that by the time of the first bad burn, I already had 1.08 firmware for 2 months, during which time I burned a few discs of which none have exhibited this problem. And next firnmware did not come till October.

So it couldn’t be firmware. My conclusion was that simply media was bad. But it wasn’t the whole batch of 50 – only 8 of them (that I could find) were bad. Either that, or they deteriorated during last 10 months to the point of being unreadable on some drives. Either conclusion was really bad for viability of Taiyo Yuden media.

I do recall having problems with the stability of my machine at that time. In fact I changed my processor to an X2 model and eventually had to change the motherboard to an entirely different chipset due to instability problems. However, I believe my first bad burn was 3 days before I bought a new processor. Nevertheless, there remains the possibility of motherboard issues causing this.

However, right now I cannot trust TY media any more than I can trust any other media. It has either questionable long-term reliability or questionable consistency (or both) and it even fails to burn at rated speed with “acclaimed” burner like BENQ 1655 (which can be chalked up to the burner as well, it might not be media’s fault). Plextor’s reputation as far as I’m concerned is safe for now. In fact, seeing how it can burn both TY03 and MCC03 (Verbatim) as well as Memorex +DL at higher speeds than BENQ – usually at or above the recommended speeds for that media – and the quality it can achieve, I cannot see what the fuss about BENQ is
all about. Or TY for that matter.

All in all, even when you’re gathering all the right information and even when you spend the money on very best, you can still get very serious quality control issues. This look like a general trend and it’s been going on for decades now. It seems us consumers care about price much more than we care about quality. Therefore, we’re willing to pay extra for quality only if the price delta is very small. And unfortunately, this leads to “extra quality” mostly coming in the form of a more famous brand name stamped on the product, rather than extra money invested in better quality parts. With some things it’s gotten so bad already that you simply can’t buy better quality no matter how much you’re willing to spend (within reason of course). Or to put it another way, if you’re filthy rich you can get stuff custom, hand-made for you, at a ludicrous price premium as you’re not benefitting from high volume production. But you know what, that’s what we deserve.