Help please. In december i bought Pioneer 108DL. He worked week or two, and stoped to write. I called my salesman and he told me that they will surplie me anotherone in a week. 108 has worked as a reader a few days more and then he was gone. Then i`ve got an offer to wait a month for 109 or to take NEC nd3500 immidietly, becouse there are no 108 anymore. Now i have nd3500ag, and for a two month it worked fine, while i got paranoical for any strange little noise i heare. But in a last three days it read and writte at 1x (or 1750 kb/s). My hard drive is prety empty, i`ve checked the DMA (it speed it up to 1800 kb/s). I am terrifying of losing this one. I`ve read about changing firmware but i can`t understand how can something work fine for a while and than start to choke only becouse of firmware. Oh yes, the buffer indicator in nero 6.3 is jumping from 10-85%).
Could it be my power surplie, and how come it doesn`t hurt my hard drive. I have changed ide cables, exchange power conectores with hard drive and instaled latest drivers for mother board.
AMD xp1800+
Gigabyte 7dxe (amd 761 and via southbridge)
512 mb ram kingstone
80gb maxtor diamondmax +9
matrox g400max
350W jnc powersurplie

Help, please

i would suggest installing the latest VIA drivers and change your powersupply to 4000watt

(in reply to tiamat markovic)

Wow, a 4000watt.I would like to have that one. Ok, tommorow i`ll try to find some better powersupplies. I hope that will work out, and that would be one of not so painfull solutions. But i`m wondering, why are optical drives so sensitive? After all, hard drives use more power, and mine is very stable.
Thanks for reply.

(in reply to emperor)

A good 350 watt power supply should handle what little you have on it. Make sure that umda 2 in enabled....Not multi word dma 2. Use a 80 wire 40 pin IDE wire. Make sure it is no more than 18 inches long. Use a GOOD brand of media. It cost a nickle to go half assed or a dime to go first class (Media) Update you Nero software. When you know that everything is working good then you can update (flash) your firmware. Do not try to update firmware until everything is working good!!!!!!!!!

(in reply to tiamat markovic)

Sorry i made a mistake, i ment 400Watt

(in reply to G_IvanAwfulitch)

Well, this is update of what happened, and at a time, a made myself an idiot. Serviceguy came to me and noticed that DVD drive was on the end of ide cable, and that jumper on a drive was set as slave. After that he set jumper as master and everything was fine, and drive was working as a suisse clock. He even checked the powersupplie with some instruments and told that it was OK. And it was for another week. Offcourse, i didn`t touch anything. Now, i have the same simptoms as before, only my drive is little faster, and can reach the full 2X speed. I am seriously starting to beeleve in gremlins, and if i don`t find solution, maibe i`ll call an excorsist.

(in reply to emperor)

Hi Markovic, that's some crazy stuff:p.
Have you tried to change out the IDE cable? It could be that it's not working very well.
Secondly, how big a buffer have you set your Nero software to use? Although burning at 1x and 2x shouldn't be affected too much from it.
Thirdly, try to check your CPU% usage when burning, hopefully it's not running at 100%. If it is, something is up with your computer system.

The above are just ways to single out and test what's happening. They shouldn't help as much, considering that your burner did work ok for a while, after the jumper changes and all.
So you have one HD one one IDE and the burner on the other as a master?

As for the wattage of your machine, 350W is more than enough in this case, esp. considering that you don't have a power hungry graphics card:). (a very nice one though :D... although there are some driver issues with the final drivers... not too sure what they are :(...). And since your PSU streaming of current is all good, you're okay there.

Just give an update on the questions above and I guess we'll see what's up. (hopefully).

(in reply to tiamat markovic)

What about DMA, is it enabled? Do you also have system ASPI drivers installed?

(in reply to Einstein)