[MikeH]

Am wondering which optical expansion bay drive to try and upgrade to on my pismo (G4 550 upgraded) powerbook. I already have a Panasonic UJ 825 purchased via MCE, sitting in the expansion bay which has a perfectly fitting rounded face plate, but seems to be very slow in burning final cut pro dv movies, which is what I wish to to principly.

I have been looking, on line at the Panasonic UJ 845 and the Pioneer DVR K05 slot loaders, but I am not sure if they both will fit pysically into the expansion bay sled of the Pismo, and then if they will be compatible with it, in OSX 10.3.9 - or even with a Mac at all come to that.

I've been ploughing through the thread "The Matshita UJ 835E only burns at 2x!" on and off for a few days now and by now I think I have worked out that x8 burning will not necessarly be the end product despite the manufactureres claims, however, I think, if the above are compatible, then a newer drive would offer some speed increase in burn times which currently are pretty slow with my UJ825. I found that to burn a 17 minute FCP movie from a "reference movie" file took over 24hrs in toast 6 the first time I tried it....! Now Toast 6 takes several hours to do that whilst using idvd I can burn about an hour's whorth of final cut pro dv material in about the same time....

Can any one confirm any aspects of compatibility? I have a sneaking feeling that the phsical size is standardised for these drives but would welcome some more certain knowledge.

regards
mh

[I was David B.]

If you need a fast drive, buy an external firewire burner. It will be faster than an internal, have no physical fit problems and can easily be replaced with a cheap internal desktop drive, as soon as you have the case.

See here

[MikeH]

I do see your point and logic, but there is something about having the drive portable within the computer that is very useful for me since I use it in different locations for editing during the year. Also that the prices of these drives are comming down whilst performance steadily increasing is making these these drives more accessible.

[pcummins]

I'd get the Pioneer DVR-K05. I recently upgraded my drive from the UJ-825 and I can burn at roughly 4x on Shintaro/Princo media which is what I use most of the time*. (I'd upgrade to 8x or DL media once I finish getting through my 100+ blanks). The drive works fine** under 10.42 and is the same drive that MCE sells as their 8x slot load burner. Froogle will show up the drive for about $105 US which is pretty reasonable (and 1/2 of what MCE sells theirs for). Or, you can locate a source in the UK via your fav price search engine.

The actual DVR-K05 is exactly the right size, so it should drop right into the expansion bay chassis you got from MCE, so it's a matter of simply popping the faceplate off and replacing the DVR-K05's one that you get with the drive. An added bonus is you get DL burning and raw DVD video read so you can play different region discs in VideoLAN without futzing with DVD Player. Handy if you need to view anything but Region 2 DVD's.

* I use Shintaro 4x discs, so I can't really comment on 8x or DL discs and speeds. Check here:

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Revi...&PageId=11

You'll see that the previous model drive will do pretty much 4x burning OK, and is about 5.5x on 8x burning due to Z-CLV. Ditto, the drive is about 16x on CD-R/W. DL I'd surmise that the drive will do a pretty much true 4x and 2.4x burn for DL media on their respective speeds. If you really want speed, get an external drive.

** Also, some drives apparently are set for Slave IDE mode rather than Master. If you want to be sure, get an IDE adaptor for the DVR-K05, then install it under Windows temporarily and update the firmware from here:

http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/pn...204516,00.html

Which inverts the CSEL signal to make it Master again. Apparently, some people have had issues where the drive was Slave vs Master, however I haven't tried it, as my drive was Master from the get-go.

[MikeH]

Hello there pccummins!

Thanks very much for all your info. I have in fact since reading the first reply above taken the plunge, an bought a Pioneer DVR-K05 after doing as much research as I could using this forum and xlr8yourmac... The cost of the technology is now so affordable (£67 here in uk from scan). After scutinising the specs of the latest MCE superdrive I was pretty sure, as you confirmed, that it was the DVR KO5 they are using... the "RAM writting not supported" clause was the give away. As you say, and as I suspected, both drives (UJ-825B and DVR K05) are exactly the same dimensions, so swapping the Panasonic/Matshita in the MCE pismo expansion bay caddy was a synch.... Also, the MCE caddy has no attatchment points at all from face plate to the "mouth" of the drive, which just sits exactly behind the slot in the caddy. So physically no problems at all with the swap. The square face plat that comes with the DVR KO5 has little barbed plastic pins whch can be just popped out of their anchor points on the drive mouth using a pointed tool.

Re the master slave thing.... Originally I tried the DVR K05 for software compatibiliity in an old pismo dvd rom caddy and like this the K05 showed up in pismo system profiler (after installing Patchburn 3" from the download site... must make a donation) as "1" or slave.... which I have read many people would prefere it to be... then when I re installed the drive in the MCE caddy I found it showed up in SP as position "0" or master... As far as I can see the master/slave relationship is only a problem on the pismo when related to firewire target disc mode... which is not an issue for me. What I really care about is speed of burning .... do you know if the master slave relationship can affect burn speed?

So now, having installed the Pioneer very easily in my pismo, the last question (and the reason I made the purchase in the first place) remains... will it burn quicker...? Again, thanks for the burn performance data link above... I will do some experimentation in due course... I suspect however, the pismo's CPU may be the limiting factor in my set up... I am interested in buring DV material created in Final Cut Pro... which seems to be a complexe task for these DVD drives... I wonder if anyone knows how I should judge burn rates, namely, should I compare data burn rates with dv file burn rates...? ie should I expect say a full dvd of ordinary comuputer data to complete at the same time as a full dvd of final cut pro refernce movie files? - is that comparing like with like...? This morning I tried burning what idvd told me was a 56min dvd and it was estimating about an hour to do it... so only about x1 speed so far...

From studying other threads here at MacNN I am aware that attaining manufacturers burn speeds is a bit of a black art.... but should I expect more then x1 from this Pioneer drive in my pismo?

So, to summerise my knowledge wish list: does anyone have experience of burning dvds on a pismo? and, does anyone know if the master slave realationship can affect drive write speed performance?

Best regards,
MikeH

[pcummins]

Yes, the actual swap over is pretty easy as I imagined. I had a harder time getting my 15" Alu actually open due to the design of the clips holding the keyboard in than actually swapping the DVD drive over which is very straight forward.

With Master/Slave you have to check whether the Pismo has two separate ATA buses. If it has two, typically the HDD goes Primary Master, the DVD-R goes Secondary Master. In the case of cheaper Apples (like the iMac FP or DVD) there is only 1 ATA bus, so in this instance the HDD goes Primary Master, and the DVD/CD goes Primary Slave. Ideally you should have 2 ATA buses, as if you're burning data sharing a single ATA bus means data gets read off the HDD, then into the CPU, then back onto the ATA bus and to the burner. This halves your effective transfer rate over having two buses if you're using a single bus. In a two bus design, data can be read and written from the HDD to the burner without any contention on the bus.

So, if you have two buses on the Pismo both the HDD and DVD-R should be Master. Sounds like it is, otherwise your Pismo wouldn't boot at all, it's possible the MCE chassis is swapping the CSEL line for you already so you don't have to worry about it. Generally you can have something silly like HDD Primary Master and Burner Secondary Slave, it does work but your milage may vary depending on how well the OS and hardware handles it, so it's best not to tempt chance. (Thank God for SATA to get rid of all that nonsense).

To test your burning speeds which are I/O bound and not CPU bound, I would expect the Pismo to keep up at least 2x to 4x DVD-R burning, make an ISO image first then burn it using Disk Copy at the rated speed that you want to try (or use a DVD-RW that can do at least 4x or so). Make sure it's a full disk (ie, 4.3 GB) to properly test and time it manually to check and compare.

Basically if your HDD and burner share an ATA bus you halve your max transfer rate for the hardware. So, if your hardware can only handle 10 MB/sec and you can burn at max only 5 MB/sec (about 4x DVD). If you had two buses then you can burn up to 10 MB/sec (about 8x DVD). There's other factors involved but the downside is sharing ATA buses between the HDD and burner is never really a good idea. I personally haven't tried a Pismo for burning, but IO traffic usually isn't that intensive, it's the disk I/O and bus speeds of the ATA controllers that let you down first. It's pretty hard to test the max I/O speed of the ATA bus as most laptop HDD's are not that flash anyhow. (Unless you spend some serious cash on a decent HDD, like the 7K60).

If you do it from FCP you have to transcode from DV to MPEG-2 format which slows the process right down, and skews your results. Also, other factors such as fragmentation, disk speed and network traffic will also skew results, so best to do it on a clean disk, off the network for best results. Once you're confident it can burn at 4x or 8x speed, you can test with other factors so you can avoid making coasters. I'm pretty sure the DVR-K05 is a bit more forgiving over the UJ-8x5 range, however, but I don't burn that many DVD's to intensively test it out.

I can say that of the discs that I've burnt, I've had only 1 failure out of 10+ 4x burns, I suspect someone kicked the table at the time and it jumped the burn, failing the verify after that. Other burns work fine without any problems. I get more failures on my PC with my A06 due to disk fragmentation than anything else, very annoying, so I'll probably just use my PB from now on. Don't really like using my PC that much anymore these days...

[MikeH]

Hello there again!

And thanks very much for all your information... It was really very useful to me, you know a lot about the pure computer system! Incidentally have you noticed the thread "The Matshita DVD-R UJ-835E only burns at 2x!!"? it gets very heated in places and has gone on for months now...since 02-1505! I studied it quite a lot before I made up my mind to buy the Pioneer. You could probably settle a good deal of the arguments there with your disk burning speed test!

From what you said about the ATA buses, now I know why I had to fit a jumper to the combo drive I installed in my mother's 600Mhz imac, making it the slave, before it would boot up again, and why my Pismo doesn't care that it has both HDD and DVD burner indicated as master... it must be that the imac has only one ATA bus and the Pismo two. Looking at the Pismo system profiler, I can see that the HDD is on "ATA-4 Bus" and the Pioneer is on "ATA-3 Bus". Luckily the Pismo is very easy to work on. I've read about how difficult it is to take apart the Alu 'books...

I've now burnt several video DVDs which have taken from one to four hours to burn around 1.8 to 2.4GB sized iDVD projects. I haven't filled up a DVD yet. As you say there is an extra process involved with burning video so I am now resigned to it taking a few hours, but its bearable now compared to over 24rs I was getting with the Panasionic UJ-825 and Toast 6!

I will try your burning speed test soon and let you know the result. Just as soon as I work out just how to make an ISO image! ...presumably exactly 4.3GB in size... I have upgraded my internal HDD to a Toshiba MK4026GAX 40GB 5400rpm, with 16mb cache, recently so that will have helped the whole equation considerably I guess.

Incidentally, when you mention disk fragmentation as being a burning problem, are you refering to the HDD or the DVD media? I've only come across HDD fragmentation which I used to regularly fix in OS9 with Disk Warrior, but I gather doesn't happen under OSX(?).

Thanks again for all the knowledge! Will be in touch.
MikeH

[galarneau]

Is it necessary to use PatchBurn to get the K05 working under the iApps in 10.4?

[pcummins]

It was really very useful to me, you know a lot about the pure computer system!

Not a problem. These days you can't understand the high level problems (ie, user level burning) without understanding the low level problems and issues. For your info, I recommend you research up the IDE/ATA Master/Slave relationship and DMA vs PIO modes. Many users get burnt over on Windows 2000 as their drives are default PIO and not DMA, so they wonder why their machines are so slow to boot or burn discs.

ncidentally have you noticed the thread "The Matshita DVD-R UJ-835E only burns at 2x!!"?

I did, but I stopped reading after about 3 pages... maybe I'll write up some web pages on it and post a link on the thread. They've been doing this for years on the CD-RW front, so no big deal unless you didn't know about it beforehand. Unfortunately, many companies are fudging the speeds and values. Honesty seems to be a lost art nowadays. For example, the Pioneer is probably better off burning at 4x and 4x DL than at 8x to avoid straining the system since a jump from 4x -> 5.5x isn't really that much in my opinion (about 4 minutes less, not much). However, the system has to support 8x (about 11 MB/sec) right at the end of the burn otherwise the burn usually fails, so it's up to you whether the 4 minutes saved is really worth it.

For me, 4x and 4x DL burning is all I need for now. Media is cheap (well, not the DL media) and my K05 does everything now. I got my A06 several years ago, and it still isn't out of date. (Though, would be nice to have 4x +/-RW burning). I promised myself not to get sucked into the speed debate after getting burnt over some 8x-12x Z-CLV CD-RW drives back quite a while ago.

Looking at the Pismo system profiler, I can see that the HDD is on "ATA-4 Bus" and the Pioneer is on "ATA-3 Bus".

That would be the two buses in action. The ATA-4 I'd say can get to 30 MB/sec, while ATA-3 gets up to 16 MB/sec. (Which is about right for both HDD and DVD burner). Again, a quick search on Google will show the specs up for this and what they support. SMART should be more prominent I think, HDD manufacturers are really playing a fine game with consumers I think.

I will try your burning speed test soon and let you know the result.

OK. Private msg me the details. Use Disk Utility to create a 4.3 GB image and burn it direct from Disk Utility, good for HFS+ backups and archiving. Or, if you have 10.4, you can now master and burn a disc from the Finder, which works just as well now. The Toshiba should speed things up a bit, I was considering a 7K60 myself, however I may wait for these new perpendicular drives to show up and see what they're like, or the hybrid Flash/HDD's and see how they perform.

You mention disk fragmentation as being a burning problem.

Yes, on my PC disk fragmentation can slow the HDD transfer rate down enough so the burner buffer depletes and the file is miswritten (that's on my A06). Ideally, you can create a small 5 GB partition on your HDD, use that to master images or discs, and then format it whenever you need to make a new disc to ensure that when the data is written when mastered that it is not fragmented.

I don't think it's that big a problem on the Macs and the DVR-K05 since it supposedly supports pausing the burns when the buffer depletes (like on the CD-RW drives now), however if you're getting semi-successful 4x or 8x burns you may want to repartition in order to get a clean part of the disk to avoid fragmentation. MacOS X automatically defragments small files, however with limited disk space and large files (1 GB+ files, or 4.3 GB images) it won't have much of a chance to do that, so best to help it out with a separate partition if you're having problems.

[MikeH]

Originally Posted by galarneau

Is it necessary to use PatchBurn to get the K05 working under the iApps in 10.4?

With both of the two superdrives I have recently operated with the powerbook pismo G4 cpu, running OSX 10.3, I have had to run patch burn in order to get the drives to burn under the iapps. These were, the Panasonic UJ-825 and the Pioneer DVR-KO5. However, this was very easy to do... just down load and click install...

MH

[NateEssex]

Someone in another thread recommended the Pioneer DVR-109BK and an external case. They have both arrived and I put the DVD burner in the external case, but my Powerbook 1.5 Ghz 12" with just a CD burner isn't seeing the drive. My instructions said something about a slave switch on the DVD burner, but I could not find one.

What do I need to do to get this DVD burner to work? Or could someone please point me in the right direction?

Thanks

[galarneau]

There should be a series of little pins between the hard drive cable and the power connector.

Usually, placing a jumper between the two vertical pins closest to the data cable sets the drive to Master.

[pcummins]

Look for the set of 3 pairs of pins labelled MA, SL and CS. You want to put the jumper onto the MAster or SLave pair of pins. The labels may be embossed/engraved on the plastic, printed on circuit board, put on the sticky label on bottom/top or not there at all, whereupon you have to download the manual to figure out which one is which.

In reference to a question I missed, seems I'm fine without PatchBurn on 10.4x, seems you only need it for 10.3 and 10.2 it appears. These days, most drives are pretty generic ATAPI devices, so in general the same set of commands works fine (except for new and exciting features like LightScribe etc).

[NateEssex]

I shall look for the jumpers today.

One last question: Can I use PatchBurn with iDVD 5.0.1? I would love to be able to burn a dvd right from iDVD 5. Is this possible?