Hello,

I have a question concerning the EAC drive-features detection!
I have a Pioneer DVD-500M. When autodetecting the drive features, EAC tells me that my drive "supports" accurate stream, caching and C2. I don´t want to use C2, so I tried with accurate Stream and caching ON. It worked fine.

My problem:
When deactivating the caching option, I get faster rips (about 5X faster) - and it still works fine. (The CRC´s are the same as with caching on, and even when testing AND copying I get the same CRC´s.)

My question:
Do you think it is OK to deactivate the Caching Option even when EAC detects, that the drive does caching?

Thanks for any replies!

caching should ALWAYS be turned off!

and for c2.....it's not adviceable to have that turned on since you can't be 100% that it works.

If your drive caches you need to check the mark in EAC. Otherwise the error detection won't work since reading sector twice returns data from cache.

What do you mean by caching 'turned off'? The checkbox in EAC 'drives caches audio data', if enabled, turns on special logic to bypass drive caching, guaranteeing accuracy, but decreasing speed. If you drive really does cache audio data, thats what you want. If you drive does not cache audio data (and most modern drives I've seen don't) checking that box will just unnecessarily slow extraction. The problem is that EAC's autodetect does not always work, and if you trust it it will sometimes end up telling you to enable this feature unnecessarily. If it says your drive does cache, you'll probably want to try disregarding it, disabling this feature, and trying to rip a badly scratched CD (particularly a track that skips when played in an audio CD player) and seeing if the CRC is consistent over several tries.

C2 is more complex since its not just a simple yes it does or no it doesn't... even if it does support C2, and return C2 data, there's no guarantee it will catch ALL errors... so even if you enable it and verify its generating consistent CRCs for a certain track or CD, there's no way to know that it will do so for a different CD, with different types or density of errors. Therefore, as stated, its probably a good idea to turn it off no matter what.

Well i just need to find out if it really caches audio-data?
I always do "Test & Copy Tracks" with EAC. When I get the same CRC in two different reads, can I be sure, that the extracted audio data is correct?

If you get the same CRC on two consecutive reads with C2 turned off , you know the track is correct, however it doesn't necessarily mean that the settings you used will ALWAYS result in accurate rips (unless you do multiple rips and check the CRC's every single time). To be sure your chosen settings will always produce accurate rips, you need to test rip some badly scratched CD's to make sure it works in a worst case scenario... in other words, you need to throw at it a test case in which the cached and the re-read versions of the same block would likely not be the same, if the drive did cache audiodata.

well, as I always use "Test & Copy Tracks", already ripped about 100 CD´s with this settings and didn´t get different CRC codes on a single CD (only the ones with read or sync errors) , I guess now I can be sure that the rips are ok.

Thanks for your replies