I just bought this from Staples for $40 after a mail-in rebate and I was wondering if there is anything more I can do to improve the performance of this DVD-RW. The label on the burner itself says it's actually branded as "Magicspin." I went to www.drvupdate.com and updated to the latest firmware, "A07R." Is there any other firmware I can update to that is later and better than this?

Thanks.

The firmware AO7R, would appear to be a "later than A07M" firmware for a BTC DRW 1016IM

Since the usual firmware lists only have A07M, you're already ahead of the pack!
However, the Mediatek chipset puts it in a similar league to the Liteon! - not great - and from what I remember, firmware version/performance of these has been all over the place, just like the improvements and severe regressions in Liteon firmware... 2 steps forward, and 1, 2 or 3 steps back as they flail around to get decent results.

The most rebranded drives, tend to be the cheapest, not the best!

(in reply to UnderWare1213)

If it's not too late, my advice would be to return it to your local Staples. My brother just bought this same drive with the same rebate deal and is planning to do that tomorrow. I just happened to find your question doing a google search for anyone else having problems with the I/O magic. I have a Sony DRU-710A and have burned quite a few dvd backups with it without any problems. The I/O Magic seemed to burn just fine on my brother's pc but then we noticed every disk was having problems on two different stand alone players. The pictures would just freeze and skip frames at various points. In our case iwe were backing up disks from the tv shows Deadwood and The Shield.

I put the offending disks in my Sony drive and it couldn't read them at all and kept locking up my pc till I realized it was from the dvd's. In short, the I/O magic seemed fine if all you're going to do is playback what you burn on the same drive. It's compatibility with anything else looks pretty darned bad. I thought it was the dvd media at first but when my drive wouldn't even read what the I/O magic created, I knew it was something else.

To top it all off, I put his drive in my machine and used software to rip the compressed backups we'd made with it to my hard drive. Then I reburned the files with Nero using my Sony. They played back fine on both our stand alone machines. No more freezes.

(in reply to Matthew)

Ellick, to let you know, your sony drive is a LiteOn drive as well, not very good writing quality. Hopefully this will be improved with new firmwares.

(in reply to ellick)

All I know is that the stand alone dvd players we have play all disks burned in the Sony flawlessly so far. Every disk burned with the I/O magic drive froze in the same players.
The Sony's firmware has been upgraded since the review on this site. Maybe it can be improved further but so far i've been happy with it. Not so with the I/O magic.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

Most people seem to rate the bottom drives as:

1. Artec / no-name
2. BTC and their many rebrands
3. Liteon and their many rebrands

Give them media they like, and they may reward you with a decent burn, but many more drives are an order of magnitude better at burning averge/unknown media.

Some say that you should test drives with GOOD media, but much more to the point is what Mr. "I've just bought a DVD writer" is likely to come away from the store with.

(in reply to ellick)

Yes, I did notice a little bit of skipping during playback on a DVD player on my TV. But perhaps this was because I used cheap media (some ghetto stuff called "Teon"). I will keep this, however, since it was only $40 and it seems to do an acceptable job.

Thanks for the help. I'll be looking out for updates.

(in reply to Matthew)

Well, good luck with it. My brother got his money back and he said he noticed Staples wasn't selling them any longer. I was also using Teon disks but tried some Memorex too and had the same problem. Every burned disk would freeze at different points on both an Apex and Daewoo dvd player. They would play back fine on the I/o drive itself.

What really made me think the drive had compatibility problems was trying to read the disks with my Sony. It would just lock up my pc trying. MPEMogul says the Sony's weakness is writing quality. The cdrlabs review says that also but mostly at 16x burns (I was burning at 8x) and they thought later firmware could improve that. Firmware updates have come out since the review. But geeze, that's writing. It should have at least been able to read disks created on the I/O Magic.

I ended up putting the I/o drive in my pc because it has a faster cpu and I wanted to see if that made a difference. Still the same problem when trying to play burned disks on the stand alone players. I then used dvd decrypter to rip the files from the burned disks that wouldn't play back right to my hard drive. I then took the drive out, packed it up, put my Sony back and burned those same files again. This time they played back on the stand alone players without any problems.

If you're seeing skips and any freezing when playing back, it would be interesting to hear what results you have using different media. Maybe it's a fine drive if you use media it likes.

(in reply to UnderWare1213)