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!"

Comments

Too good to be true?

[stevenbdjr]

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!

Re:Too good to be true?

[prof187]

But does it also chop jullienne fries?

old news......

[H3XA]

another source of info

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Articles/Specific. asp?ArticleHeadline=Overclocking&Series=0

with mods for -
AOPEN
HP
Iomega
LG
Lite-On
Plextor
Ricoh
Sony
TraxData

- HeXa

Firmware

[zapfie]

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.

Re:Firmware

[Angry White Guy]

This is not *technically* just a firmware upgrade. This is circumventing/reverse engineering of their intellectual property, and in violation of the DMCA.

Imagine what would happen to the world markets if you were to do this. Just sit back and watch all that nothing spread like wildfire!

AWG

Just like my opinion, my sarcasm's free! Just remember: You get what you pay for!

Re:Firmware

[Waffle Iron]

You can do whatever you want with your CD-R drive and it would be totally legal- you have first sale rights.

You don't have a right to be an "X" thief. These companies are selling you Xs. You paid for 32 Xs. By modifying the drive, you stole up to 16 extra Xs from the manufacturer.

If you bought a 6-cylinder Ford, would it be OK to break into the dealership and steal two more cylinders so you could have a V8? Of course not.

Xs don't just grow on trees. Stop stealing them.

If you really feel you need a bunch of Xs, you can get them in bulk from Microsoft, who sells them by the box. It really doesn't cost that much per X to stay legit.

Re:Firmware

[mosch]

It's also illegal to modify ATM machines to give you money without deducting an appropriate amount from your bank account. The nerve of the government, always keeping the thieves^Wpeople down!

I can see it now...

[papasui]

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...."

It wasn't new

[jsse]

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)

Re:It wasn't new

[Reality Master 101]

And there's a good reason why the mainframe had a jumper, but the PC doesn't. IBM wants to sell you a future upgrade for the mainframe. They had no after-sale incentive for the PC, since they're just going to try selling you a new PC.

Big deal

[asavage]

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.

Re:ahh crap

[jonnythan]

You paid $80 to save about 20 seconds recording a cd? Is your time really worth $14,400/hr?

Re:Plextor?

[Ziviyr]

From what I read all you can do is rename/upgrade firmware on rebadged Plextor drives. (they don't seem to play the underclocking game much)

Well.... is it really worth it?

[hashinclude]

These are the stats I have on my machine (p3-733, 512MB ram, IDE-100)

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 :P )

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.

Re:Well.... is it really worth it?

[jbridge21]

Actually, the 52X and 72X CD-ROMs were a special deal made by Kenwood, I've got their 72X one sitting right here. And it was labelled True-X, meaning it actually gets that speed. The trick it used was splitting the laser beam into seven parts, to read different parts of the track? disc? simultaneously. I clocked this thing once by reading the entire contents of a 650MB CD to /dev/null, it AVERAGED 9 MB/s across the entire surface!

Re:Well.... is it really worth it?

[Jucius Maximus]

"I did discover that IE5.5 FUBARs CD burning, tho -- causes constant buffer problems, regardless of what software is used, and REALLY slows things down."

Strange ... I have had problems with Roxio EasyCD 5 (*) where the only way to get the software to WORK was to reinstall IE5.5.

(*) I personally have ditched EasyCD because I bought(**) Nero several weeks ago which is worlds better and have never had any buffer problems. These roxio problems were on a client's machine.

(**) Yes, I actually spent money on Nero and did not find a pirated serial somewhere. This program is worth the money and it is not overpriced, therefore I pay for it.

"BTW per tests someone did (story posted here a while back), 52x or so is the practical top limit due to CD media shrapneling itself at around 56x."

Limitations will be overcome by sidestepping the problem. Every now and then we also see an article about how the physical limits of magnets have been reached but HDD mfgrs keep coming out with bigger drives. Sooner or later some manufacturer will use more lasers or spin the laser in the opposite direction of the disc to obtain a higher speed. (***) They could even allow people with hordes of RAM to cache the disc image on a RAM disk thus eliminating any IDE related problems.

(***) Yes, I did come up with this idea as I was typing this post. I did not copy it from somewhere.

Don't go too fast

[naoursla]

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.

Silly

[Reality Master 101]

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?

Nothing new here...

[athakur999]

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.

What are you thinking?

[fmaxwell]

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.

Re:What are you thinking?

[Reziac]

Even tho as noted above, that 32x may really be a remarked 48x -- you can't know for sure. It may well be a for-really 32x, and tho you can get it to run at 48x, data integrity is now compromised.
So I agree, the risk is not worth the gain, especially when the price difference is trivial (LiteOn 32x, $65; LiteOn 48x, $80 -- that's the typical local clone dealer price). CDRWs write enough iffy disks that don't store well as it is -- why compound the problem?? It ain't worth saving 15 bucks.

Re:What are you thinking?

[fmaxwell]

I suppose this will have to do with the media properties rather than the drive.

It has to do with how well the drive burns the media. To oversimplify, how do you know that the 32X drive has adequate power at the laser when overclocked to 48X?

It would be a simple matter to check the md5sums. dd if=/dev/cdrom | md5sum -

That doesn't show error rates. That shows if there were one or more unrecoverable errors. If you get a CD with a lot of raw errors that are recovered, the CD will be much less tolerant of damage, degradation, etc., before it develops unreverable errors. It's also less likely to work as reliably when you read it in multiple drives.

Re:The faster you go...

[Chasing Amy]

> Remember when 4x was fast?

Yup. I'm still using my Creative 4-2-24 CD-RW drive to this day. :-) 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.

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. :-)

You young'uns might think this is new

[trenton]

Anyone remember using hot glue guns to melt the 1.44mb hole in your 720kb 3.5" disks? Those disks used the same media, but in a different physical case. So, if you made the 720kb disks look like 1.44s, they'd work.

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.

Why NOT To Do This

[Caraig]

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.