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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!
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
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...."
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)
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.
You paid $80 to save about 20 seconds recording a cd? Is your time really worth $14,400/hr?
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.
Cached Link
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
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
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.
> Remember when 4x was fast?
:-) Since I've never had the need to get CDs burnt as fast as technologically possible, I've never felt like upgrading it. It's followed me from my old K6-2 to my Duron to my Athlon.
:-)
Yup. I'm still using my Creative 4-2-24 CD-RW drive to this day.
Unfortunately, after 5 years or so of faithful service it's been slowly dying for the last few months. First it stopped reading past 650MB on 700MB CDs. Weird, but I figured the thing's just so old... And then, it started burning coasters about 10% of the time even though I use good Taiyo Yuden media. Then it gradually climbed up until now a CD gets burnt properly about 1 in 10 tries. Sometimes the CDs would come out completely unwritten, and sometimes the data would only be very lightly burnt in, making it obvious the writing laser wasn't working reliably anymore.
So, it's time to finally put the old girl out to pasture and get one of those newer, faster, more versatile models. Plextor or Asus, I guess, from what I've read about various models. But I'll kinda miss the old CD burner, the only part of my first desktop PC that's still being used in my newest desktop PC...
Sad when old hardware finally bites the dust.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
I don't get what you're saying.
My logic was as follows:
If he pays $80 to free 20 seconds worth of his life, his living time must be worth $14,400/hr.
He saves 20 seconds every time he uses it. I'm not saying it's worth paying $80 for such a small gain, but your logic is flawed. Your numbers only add up if he only uses the drive once.
Unless where you're from CR-Rs are single-use disposable devices...
>>>>
CD-R's *are* single-used devices. You mean CD-R drives do you not?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
$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
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."
You paid $80 to save about 20 seconds recording a cd? Is your time really worth $14,400/hr?
:)
Well, what if his office catches fire and he needs to back-up his data quickly?
Seriously, though, think about it:
If he burns one CD a day, then in a year that $80 has saved him a couple of hours of work...
If he burns 100 CDs a day (his job is to back up eBay, or perhaps a large computer lab) then it's really, really worth it...
And if he backs up one CD at the end of the day and gets off work 20 seconds quicker because of it... that is absolutely priceless.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
That ain't nothin man, this guy's got a Type-R American Standard!
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.