Hello!

A friend of mine gave me his LG GSA-2166D unit which also supports DVD-RAM. However, when I insert my brand new Verbatim 3x certified discs (no cartridge), the device produces some noise that is similar to the one my Plextor produces when it has problems reading a disc. You can hear the motor spin up and down all the time and also some high-pitched tones. I tried to format the media using Windows Explorer (it took like 2 minutes for the context menu to pop-up while the drive was producing the mentioned noise) but I failed. I am now erasing the disc using Nero which seems to work fine (the LED is blinking and I'm at about 15%).

Is the described behavior normal (sorry if this sounds stupid, but I never used DVD-RAM)?

Regards,
Sebastian

I have never heard of DVD-RAM before. I know the DVD specifications have DVD+R , DVD-R, DVD+RW. DVD-RW. Hmm... okedoke I am reading about it now appearently it acts more like a "hard disk" then an actually disc and is dual layered? very very interesting. Could it have something to do with which type of DVD-RAM disc you are using?. I guess their are two specfications 1.0 and 2.0. Quite frankly I am getting tired of the industry and all their wars over "optical formats".

My LG GSA-4120B mounts DVD-RAM discs in no more than few seconds, so something is wrong either with the drive or the disc. Any DVD-RAM drive should be able to use 3x discs I think. I recommend InCD for handling them.

What discs are you using, Verbatim? I am going to get some Panasonic DVD-RAM discs and see what happens.

I have one single-sided Maxell 5x disc, and one double-sided Panasonic 3x disc. I also had a double-sided 2x disc but I'm selling it as it's too slow. So far I haven't had any problems with them (so I can't tell you which brand is good and which is bad).

After formatting the disc to UDF 2.0 with InCD, it took around 10 seconds for the drive to recognize the media.

Edit: Damn, seems that it has a write offset.

Does anyone know if there is an official firmware 1.01 for the GSA-2166D?

Strange ... is the read offset still 667 ?

No, -102 (the read offset correction in EAC is +102). The write offset is -30.

So LG finally ditched the older hardware that hasn't been changed since the old 4x4 model GSA-4040B ...

Perhaps you should have gotten an external 5163D instead ...

Actually, I'd like an internal device: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=40818

UDF 2.0 is buggy, I'd rather use 2.01, or 2.5 if you don't care about compatibility - it's faster, unless you use duplicate metadata option which slows things down (but increases error-robustness).

What about FAT32?

You can try to download and run an "LGE ODD On-line Auto F/W update" utility from http://de.lgservice.com/

InCD doesn't support FAT32. As you know, FAT32 will be readable by most things, and perhaps will be faster if you store a lot of small files, but otherwise it's crap.

It crashes with the message "Runtime error 7: Out of memory". Some users suggest starting the program in Windows 95 compatibility mode, but that doesn't help either.



Mine does. I am using the InCD version that came with Nero 7.

Oh, so they're keeping the one coming with Nero6 at the old version, good to know, thanks.

I didn't quite understand what you mean.

Anyways, the LG I tested comes with Nero 6.

I meant that I have InCD (v4.3.20.1) from Nero6 and it doesn't support FAT32, the one from Nero7 is probably newer and as you said it supports FAT32. By "support" I mean that I have no choice to format the disc in FAT32, only different versions of UDF.