USB Poo

[growler_south]

Lets talk about external USB DVD writers. Mo had one and it continually shat itself when using DVD Shrink + Nero. We put it down to it being an older Iomega drive, with USB1.

But no! Yesterday Growler buysa nice shiny dual-layer writin' drive, a big fat external case with USB2, plugs it into his monster computer at work and lo! we have the same problem. SCSI device error. Many coasters. Pretty, shiny, dual-layer coasters. Unhappy Growler.

Research leads to the conclusion that running a DVD writer over USB is terminally b0rked, thanks to incompatabilities between SCSI and Windows USB drivers. Nero seems to be the worst, but other DVD writing software has the same problem sometimes. DVD-R seems to be worse, but +R occasionally has problems.

The solution is Firewire. I swapped my shiny USB2 case for an identical Firewire case and no more problems. Happily buring dual layers at 8x speed.

Now all those DVDs can be safely backed up.

Comments

[smellykaka.livejournal.com]

I've had mucho hassles with external burners, the last one I was using was a nightmare with Firewire but got a lot better when I connected it via USB2 instead, go figure.

Still the boss wouldn't order me an IDE one to chuck in my desktop, although our latest round of purchasing will get machines with DVD burners standard, and I'm (finally) going to be getting one...

[growler-south.livejournal.com]

We finally fixed Mo's Iomega drive by ripping the bastard thing out of its external case and installing it properly. Theyre just IDE drives on the inside... you could do that to the dodgy external one at your work.

[smellykaka.livejournal.com]

Problem is, the dodgy external one is external because it's supposed to be shareable by a lot of people.

Mind you, they clearly don't want me to get any work done, so why should I feel guilty about slacking off on LJ? :)

[growler-south.livejournal.com]

Is your company really that hard up that they cant afford to spend $99 on an IDE burner for you? not even MY boss is that tight..

(HEh heh he reading over my shoulder again)

[smellykaka.livejournal.com]

No, they just defy logic. They won't buy me a $99 DVD burner, but they'll replace my barely-a-year-old desktop that's 100% fast enough for my needs with a brand new one that just happens to include a DVD burner.

[growler-south.livejournal.com]

Will they give you the old one to take home?

[smellykaka.livejournal.com]

I sincerely doubt it. I have a hefty collection of old Sun servers and Alpha and SGI workstations that I scored from work, but they only biff stuff out when it's so old that nobody in their right mind would try to use it.