Hi, I already write this in another related topic but I think it could be nice to be in a specific thread, don't consider this as spam :) :

quote:


I thought these times were over, but today I experienced kind the same problems with sata controller ...

Burning
from sata hdd (hitachi deskstar 120GB)
to sata dvdwriter (pioneer dvr-212)
using a sil3112 (abit nforce2 motherboard)
causes problems.

Whatever the write speed, 4x on fresh verbatim dvd-r, Nero reported me hundreds of errors on the first quarter of the disc.
In fact its worst than old buffer underrun problems, its some kind of data corruption o_o. The burned videos can be watch sometimes, with display quirks, but sometimes it make the codec crash ...

Now I copy my files on my pata hdd (old but loved WD 80GB) and then burn to the pioneer and theres no more data inconsistencies.

At first I thought the writer was in fault, especially after reading its cdrinfo review lol but after some internet digging, i found some issues related to simultaneous use of both sata channels .. (on silicon image website they say it features 2 independent dma , that doesnt seems to help here i guess lol)

I ran two test burns using the pata hdd to sata dvdwriter and it seems okai, but im still writing at 4x for the moment :)

By the way, Im wondering if its pure hardware problem or if its specific to windows here, I spend one day making backups under linux and IIRC I transfered data from my secondary sata drive to the sata dvdwriter ... but I cant be sure now.... I hope im wrong here because these dvd were not divx but plain rar archives and they dont accept bits errors nicely lol

Bye

I don't think the sil3112 is a good choice for optical drives.  I am pretty sure that is a RAID only controller and optical drives don't play nice on those.

(in reply to fasteez2)

I never found any articles about choosing a good sata controller for burners
I assumed to much about the goodness of sata raid , aka no drawbacks compared to pata , aka obvious atapi support ...

On silicon image website i saw a more recent sata ctrl sil3512 iirc which claim support for atapi drives... i suppose atapi wasnt important at that time.

Anyway I'm digging to find ways to make the sil3112 work ... it seems that a sata bios upgrade can do the trick.. the strange part is that even if theres no atapi support, the drive burned some cds without any problems ...

(in reply to SithTracy)

I'd look to an add-on card for supporting ODD, or get a Pioneer DVR-112D (IDE version) of the drive.

(in reply to fasteez2)

yes thats my two last options

i'm also considering buying a slim external firewire burner :D ( hoping theres no problems with FW controller too )

(in reply to SithTracy)

FW (IEEE1394a) on the nForce2 boards should be fine... I have an Asus A7N8X Deluxe board that has similar features to your Abit (nForce2, Sil3112, IEEE1394a).  Never had a problem with my DVC camera on the FireWire port.  Keep in mind, around that time, SATA was in it technological infancy.  Hard drives were the only things available for that bus and it was just a step up from ATAPI/EIDE - Ultra DMA.

(in reply to fasteez2)

thanks a lot for this infos :)

(in reply to SithTracy)