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Hot-Rod Your CD-RW Drive
Anonymous Coward writes: "Currently almost everyone with a computer has a CD-ROM drive and also a big part of them have a CD-RW drive. But what if you want to spend less time on writing a CD-R ? You have to buy a new one, or, if you are a real geek, you just overclock it! Seems to be to good to be true ? It's not! Currently a lot of cheap manufacturers of CD-RW drives are using the same parts in their 32x,40x, and 48x drives and start to sell them at 32x, later to 40x and in end as 48x. and with a little upgrading of the firmware (totally legal) you will have a faster drive, because you remove its limits! It currently works on drives from Lite-On (who also makes drives for Memorex, TDK, Iomega, Cendyne, TraxData and Pacific digital all overclockable) And the list goes on as there are also overclock tricks for LG (32x -> 40x) and Sony drives (32x -> 48x). If you don't believe it, read all the reactions and the postings on the forums mentioned above!"
Don't suppose this goes for old Plextor writers does it?
Luke-Jr
And if you act now, we'll send you two kits for the price of one. That's the two CD-RW hot-rod kits, plus the terry cloth bath robe, absolutley FREE!
Does anyone seen the humour in "hot-rodding" a CD burner?
Woohooo! Another device I need a liquid cooling system for.
Can I also play my audio CDs at 48x? My dog seems to love those high pitches...
another source of info
. asp?ArticleHeadline=Overclocking&Series=0
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Articles/Specific
with mods for -
AOPEN
HP
Iomega
LG
Lite-On
Plextor
Ricoh
Sony
TraxData
- HeXa
Does this come with instructions on how to use your computer as central heating? Just think: No more cold winters! Actually, My 8-10 running computers *DO* heat my apartment completely during the winter. ;)
hahahahhaha man i feel like a dork buying a 40x now :P
Upgradinging of the firmware, totally legal? Ackk. You can do whatever you want with your CD-R drive and it would be totally legal- you have first sale rights. I will be scared if we live in a country where people even have to wonder if modifying their own hardware is "totally legal" or not.
slashdot!=valid HTML
LIVE AT 10.
An area man inadvertently set fire to his dwelling while attempting to burn Jenna's Built for Speed with his self modified CDRW drive. When asked why he modified his CD recording device he stated. "My wife was coming home...."
just when i go and pay an extra 80 bux for the boost from 40x to 48x #@$%@%
-judging another only defines yourself
Why would upgrading the firmware on a product you own not be "completely legal"?
What strange DMCA-ridden world is this that I've suddenly fallen in to? It's dark in here.
When I worked at IBM an engineer told me the million dollars 'mainframe upgrade' was actually removing a jummper from the motherboard. So I started to remove one jumper at a time from my IBM PC to see if it'd run faster. (the answer is no)
Why would hardware manufacturers sell products that can be much faster and therefore better, and then continually "upgrade" them and sell them again? It seems like one big scam, to try to get the population to keep on upgrading. Rediculous.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Remember when 4x was fast? At least then you could buy a CD-Rom drive that didn't sound like the neighbors are mowing their lawn...
Who needs force feedback controllers? I've got a laptop with a high speed CD-Rom drive... good for simulating such vibrations as a car engine or a small earthquake!
The difference between burning at 40 to 48 speeds is about 20 seconds. Some of us still have to use crappy 4 speed burners. Also a lot of CD media isn't even compatable at those speeds anyway.
Let's see....so they less money on the 32x drives, since they're using the same components on the 48x that yield much higher margins. So....if we all buy their lowest rating drives, would they dip into red? =)
1x - 1 hr 10 mins (total, yes I have had one)
2x - 40 mins (actually something like 38)
4x - 19-20 mins
12x - 7 mins
24x - 5 mins
32x - 4:30 mins
40x - ? (haven't upgraded my drive yet
My point being that as things are right now, IDE hard drives are not quite fast enough even with an 8MB buffer to keep up with the data transfer required (and yes, I am running my 7200 Maxtor 27GB as Primary master, and LG 32X CD-RW as Secondary Master on an Intel 815EEA2 board)
How does overclocking (and possibly destroying the drive mechanism, though rare) really help me burn CD faster? Current software / hardware configs give me no better than 4:30 mins .. (while the 24x gives ~5:20)
I think this is something like the 52x and 60x and 72x CDROM, where the number behind the X stands for MAX ... meaning that with optimal (ideal?) parameters, the drive gives 72x (1x = 150kbps)
I'd much rather stick with my * unmodified * 32x drive, thanks.
US is now divided as the "Red" and "blue" states. Red States = communist countries. Coincidence? I think not
Unfortunately, CDs explode into bits of metal and plastic shrapnal if spun too fast. This isn't like burning out a CPU from over clocking. /. had an article a while back about a guy testing the spin limits of CDs.
clickety-click
with a little upgrading of the firmware (totally legal)
So the police won't knock on my door if I take apart my CD-ROM? Whew, now I can come out of hiding!
Cached Link
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
I've got some older CD-R blanks which are marked
16x, 20x, 32x, etc. - do these have any problems
working at higher speeds than they are marked?
The marked speeds were near top-of-the-line
speeds when they were bought.
I HIGHLY doubt that the exact same TESTED components are used in both drives. It is much more likely that a 40x drive is simply a drive that passed the 40x tests, but not the 48x tests, just like how processors are graded.
It would be kind of stupid to stamp 40x on a box just to sell it for a lower price. Why not sell a 48x for the lower price and intice the customer further?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Upgrading your CD writer drive via firmware is nothing new, it's been going on for quite a while.
Coincidentally enough, just last night I upgraded a 6x burner I bought for $10 to an 8x using the tricks on this page. There's info there for several older model drives.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Is it just me or are the Citizen Corps reminiscent of the visitors youth brigade (whatever it was called) in the old miniseries V?
Duffman can never die! Only the actors who play him!
...the firmware (totally legal) you will have...
I have a small sticky label over one of my screws on my CDRW drive that says "Do not remove". Doing so will be against the DMCA(?)
Damn it! (yeah so what: mod me down for being offtopic)
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
How do you know that it "works" once you are done? Would you just assume that the ability to burn a CD and then read it proves that everything is fine? Has anyone looked into the error rates of hot-rodded drives vs. those drives sold to operate at the higher speeds? Has anyone examined the long-term data retention of CDs burned at 48X in what was a 32X burner?
This is simply foolish. Unless you work for the factory, you simply don't know if there are hardware or performance differences between the 32X, 40X, and 48X drives. For all you know, they each have a different laser diode. So you're going to burn hundreds of CDs, maybe backing up valuable data and software, without knowing if they can be read a year from now? Great idea.
If your time is so valuable that you need to upgrade from 32X to 48X burning, you can afford a new CD writer.
Thanks; that went in my quote file.
This whole citizen corps thing is reminding me of the informants of nazi-germany. its frightening.
its called Free Enterprise my friend. Get used to it, its only been around for thousands of years.
because *technically* its not overclocking. So you cant "possibly [destroy] the drive mechanism" any more than you can possibly do it thru normal usage.
If you run your mobo/video card/whatever at a higher rate than it is *mechanically* specified for, that is overclocking. Changing the FSB speed from 66mhz to an unsupported 100mhz is overclocking.
Taking a device that is *mechanically* specified to run at a higher speed, but is being throttled by its firmware, is NOT overclocking. Im sure someone could come up with a proper term for it, like "Liberating" it or some other such sanctimonious term.
If they've already manufactured the drive, they've already lost the money it took to make it.
But if you buy the drive, you run up the sales figures for that drive, and the part of the company that chooses which product to make will choose to make more of that drive.
Will I retire or break 10K?
[CDs shattering in a CD-ROM drive once they spin up] is most likely an urban legend.
No. It happened to my neighbor. He had to go out and buy a new burner and a new copy of the CD. It was especially tough for him because he wasn't even old enough to have a real job; child labor laws.
Will I retire or break 10K?
$14,400/hr ???
At that rate, the only person this guy could be is my lawyer.
Or, better yet, cutting an additional notch in your 5.25" floppys, so they could be read, upside down, in single sided drives? Ah, my old Apple 2 days.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
I tried cleaning, but to no avail. When conventional methods didn't work I even tried using a compressed air canister to blow the area out, figuring it doesn't matter if I damage anything since it isn't working well anymore in the first place. :-)
:-)
But, alas, I think the laser is just semi-dead... Not that I can blame it--getting five useful years out of a PC part isn't as common as it used to be.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
I have a 4x iomega burner with an usb connection. I'd happily overclock it if it weren't for the speed limit of the usb port - usb burners are just incapable of burning faster than 4x afaik.
But I'm pretty sure it would work apart from that, usb-storage always identifies the burner as a 6x burner,so there would be at least some speed to gain...
Should have bought a firewire unit instead.
I wish that my brain could do SMP...
Most high-speed drives seem to not take into account the stresses placed upon CDs. A 56x drive imposes a HUGE amount of momentum on the disc. This is something to be of concern about. Even more so, when you consider the amount of HEAT being generated. Not only by the laser, but by the drive's motor itself.
The situation is worsened when you consider the write-laser, which imparts much more heat onto the disc than the read-laser. Be very aware of this! The faster the drive, the more heat and stress being put onto the disk. Bad Things Can Happen.
I had the displeasure of having a disc EXPLODE in my CD-ROM drive last week, because of heat and stress placed upon it. I'm lucky I didn't have the thing at neck-level since pieces of disk flew across the room.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
I hate this stupid-ass development: people are calling DVD players "DVDs." eg. "Hey: do you have a DVD? I can lend you some movies." What the Hell?
People should ask for permission to be stupid. They should ask me.
I'd say, "no."
Karma: Chameleon (Mostly affected by the 1980s)
how the concept of modifying the programming in hardware you own has already been villified so successfully by the industry that people put in qualifiers like (and legal!) in statements like this.
It should NEVER BE A QUESTION.
If you own it, you can do what you want with it. Any law that says otherwise is morally wrong.
Air conditioning is your friend. I know it is my friend.
I just put a Type-R sticker on my CD-RW drive. I haven't tested it yet, but all of my friends say that it adds at least 5-10X to my drive's performance!
I have a teac 56s-600. They only provide self extracting windows and mac binaries. How does one flash a cdr firmware when one is using linux?
Liberty.
Somehow your numbers don't add up. If you're using a 74 minute CD, somehow you got:
1x - burnt in 70 minutes
2x - burnt in 40 minutes = 80 minutes if drive was set to 1x?
4x - burnt 19-20 = 76-80 if 1x
12x - burnt in 7 min = 84 minutes? to burn a 74 min CD?
24x - burnt in 5 min = 120 minutes if 1x???
I find it hard to believe you when from 12x to 24x and only saved 2 minutes. Some of the newer "48x" drives start at like 24x, and only at the very end does it really reach 48x, so unless your 24x starts at 12x, then at the very end gets to 24x, then something is very, very wrong.
Test it with CD Speed.
Most new drives come with something called "burnproof", which can actually stop cd recording in the middle of the cd if there's a problem with data access, making it nearly impossible to screw-up the cd. Review sites have run quake3 demos on slower, 500mhz systems while burning a cd using a drive with burnproof, and they were not able to screw up the cd recording process.
if you would have read the linked article and what several other people have said you would have discovered that they're not really "overclocking" the cd-rw, they're just changing the firmware.
The drives are exactly the same except for the fireware, there isn't some special 48x drives with cpus set to a higher speed to allow for faster recording speeds, just change the fireware of your 32x to a 48x and ta-da, you're burning at 48x.... at least for the last 5 seconds of the burn process you are....
sometimes the firewares are incompatible, which explains why not every drive can be upgraded to a faster drive, and the older drives probably don't even have capability of spinning the cd fast enough to obtain 48x speeds.
What these companies are doing after manufacture is binning the parts to how well they test. If they test poorly, they sell them as slower drives - it the test s have better results, they sell these as faster drives. Taking a slower drive and just speeding it up will work, but some things will fail - you just won't know what since you are doing an exhaustive QA testing on the device after you clock it. What happens when you overclock but then the temperature of the drive rises, then the quality drops!
--what was that foxy head alien babe's name? I remember one episode where she opens WIDE and scarfs down a guinea pig in one bite. Hate to say it, but I thought her "potential" was simply awesome.....
Oh ya, creating the junior nark league. Yep, we got the best fascist government that fiat currency can buy now. throw in sophisticated madison avenue propoganda spreading and indoctrination in the publik skules, dash in a smidgen of paranoia induced by government, shake up the economy, scary the peepuls, wham bam thankee ma'am, ya got your fourth reich.
Go ahead and kill em boys, they are just dumb injuns, filthy redskins, johnny rebs, stupid niggers, filthy huns, gooks, slopes, ragheads, gun owners, jews, camel jockeys, beaners, christians, "terrorists".
It don't matter, every large government when it flips to being fascist-they all do eventually- always needs to create sub humans to demonize to take the heat off their own crimes and incompetence. This generation is only different by the level of technology they will throw at it. It's no accident they created an official military "kill the sub human enemies" video game, and it's no wonder they created the junior nark league. Everything is right on historical despotic schedule, right down the line. Wanna know the fascist goons new buzzword that is this generation's and societie's replacement/analogy for "sieg heil"? It's "let's roll".
to order. And as a special bonus, we'll have the terry cloth bath robe autographed by our former CEO. That's right, you get two hot-rod kits, and an autographed terry cloth bath robe! For FREE, that's right, no charge. You will then recieve a new kit every month for a mere pittance of $1!
/. manager/coder people!)
Total cost is $0 plus $100 "super deal" tax, and $29.99 shpping and handling per kit, plus $200 "last minute" tax and $100 "autographed" tax and $29.99 shipping and handling.
(This would've been funnier if the <sub> tag was allowed. HINT HINT
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
What kind of media do you use if you're shooting up to a 48x burn speed?
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
This has been discussed a while ago on oc.com forums: http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&th readid=60158&highlight=burner
(Thanks to bender for the link).
The reason they do this is to discriminate between people who just want a CD drive, and the person who wants the best possible. (More technically, they want to charge people with a low elasticity of demand more, and still sell to people witha high elasticity of demand).
If they produced just 1 model drive, then they can reasonably expect to sell it at 1 price. Let's suppose they can sell it for $50. Now, there are some people who must have the fastest drive, damn the price. These people will (obviously), buy it for $50. There are also some people who are willing to pay $50 for the drive, but not necessarily too much more. They will also buy. There is a 3rd class of people who would like a drive, but don't want to buy at $50. They don't buy.
Now lets introduce another, slower model. We can raise the price of the fast drive, say to $75. The performance freaks will all still fork out for it. If we price the slow drive at say, $40, we will still sell a drive to all the people who bought at $50 (but don't want to pay $75). We will also sell a bunch of drives to people who never did want to pay $50, but will fork out $40.
The end result is that we can extract more money out of the high end ($75 drive buyers) and the low end (people who buy at $40 but not at $50). We lose out some in the middle (people who are now paying $40 but would have paid $50), but if you balance the prices right, you can end up ahead.
Intel did the same thing with the 486SX. The earlier manufactured SXs were just the DX with the floating point co-processor disabled. They were actually more expensive to make, but they sold for less. Some people had to/really wanted to buy the DX, and paid the high price. Intel gained a large low-end market with the cheaper SX chip, and overall ended up ahead. Even the speed-ratings of their processors was price-discrimination. Intel's fabrication technology turned out very few parts that couldn't pass the high-clockrate tests. But if they sold them as high-clockrate parts, they'd glut the highend market, and drive the prices down. By labelling them slower, they can still charge a premium for the faster parts, while maintaining low-end marketshare.
Airplane tickets--same deal. It doesn't cost the airline more to sell you a ticket that doesn't include a weekend stay. They just want to charge the business traveller more. Business travellers have a low elasticity of demand -- they *must* fly. They are willing to pay a lot more. The tourist has a high elasticity of demand -- flying is totally optional. By including a weekend stay requirement for cheap fares, they can get more money overall.
Student/senior discounts for movie tickets. Cheaper meals during lunch than dinner at restaraunts. It's a very common practice in business.
- LG GCW 8160B
- LG CGRW-8084
- Mitsumi CR-4805 TE
the sites mentioned above are slashdotted but maybe i'll be able to *slow* my drive down to 2x!Wait until everyone figures out that all the new IDE hard disks are 160GB and just need a firmware update to turn a 20GB drive into a 160GB one!
I remember when my HP8100 4x2x24x burner was a rippin' little machine and I got it at a steal for only $450 Canadian. When I got it home, I found it could only burn up to 74 minutes on a CD, where a friend of mine could burn right up to 83 minutes! I was frustrated with my purchase and started digging around on the internet. It turns out that the limit was a firmware thing and not hardware at all; some nice fella out there even put up a modded firmware for me, so I could get those extra few minutes onto a CD-R. I flashed my burner's firmware, and voila! I can now fully utilize 80 minute discs.
I now have a 40x Liteon I got for barely more than $100 Canadian, and I've been running it at 48x for a while now. Not only is it marginally faster, but my burner now supports Mt. Rainier, and the burn quality is significantly better! Before discs from this burner done at higher than 16x skipped in my car, now I can write them right up to 48x and they work great.
There's also a lot of CD-R media out there that's rebadged falsely. There's got to be hundreds of brands of CD-Rs out there, but there aren't nearly that many factories producing CD-Rs. It's not the case so much anymore, but 80 minute discs and discs rated past 4x used to cost quite a lot more than other ones, but if you knew what no-name brands to buy, you'd end up with identical discs to the more expensive ones.
Rebadging takes place everywhere in the computer market, so keep your eyes peeled. Now and again, Dell sells refurbished monitors at REALLY good prices. I mean $300 Canadian for a 21" monitor. A friend of mine grabbed two of them a while ago, and he popped it open to check the manufacture date. Not only were the monitors only a couple of months old, there were giant Sony stickers inside. It's no secret that Dell monitors are usually remarked Sonys, but these were barely used, high end Sony monitors selling dirt cheap.
Isn't there a possible copyright problem? To update with a different firmware version requires one to make two copies of a program (the firmware) one probably doesn't own a copy of. The first is the copy made when one downloads it and the second is the copy made in the flash memory of the drive.
This might count as fair use if one owns a drive with the updated firmware, as long as one doesn't have the two drives on at the same time or something like that. But failing that, it seems to be the sort of copying that requires a license (IANAL, though).
It is true that the company many put the firmware on the web, and one might argue that that involves an implicit download and flash-to-device license grant. But I think this would be shaky if the download were marked as "Firmware update for Widget CD-RW Model 3491". Then it seems reasonable to suppose that the implied license applied to Widget CD-RW Model 3491 owners, and not to Widget CD-RW Model 3391 owners.
So there could be legal problems. Of course if one can just patch the old firmware with one's own code to generate the new firmware, then it might be less problematic.
The firmware download site might also have an explicit click-through license.
But IANAL.
ARP
I've had problems in the past and I was wondering
if there are any cd burners/roms out there that
could actually tell the OS how many errors there
were on the cd? I would be interested in checking
out the number of errors of any system backups I
made so I could duplicate the ones that didn't
come out so good.
Does anybody know if this work for MSI burners?
i've got a 32/12/40 burner from msi and i would like 2 know if this works for my burner
Anyone know if LG DVD/CDR/RW combo drives can be overclocked using the same techniques?
Yeah, I did this with my old Ricoh 7040S with the 7060S BIOS.
o di fications_ricoh_7060.shtml
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_m
Actually you can do similar things to hard drives as well. By small firmware or hardware (small! one chip etc) modifications you can make them spin faster. Or make a simple raid-0 thing internally. I have wondered for a LONG time why no one is doing it. Getting a fast drive worth 2000USD for just like 50USD sounds attractive at least to me...
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