[delrossi]

new 800 12" cdr wont burn at maximum speed
Some of the Philips 40x cds only burn at 4x not the rated 16x.
However on an external fw cd burner the exact same piece of media will burn at 16X. though some of the disks do burn at 16x. its intermitent.
Whats up??

[nsxpower]

Check Apple Profiler and see which drive you have ... My 12" 600 has a Combo drive that was only used in 14" at the time of purchase.

Also, what are you using to burn the CD?

[ThisGuy]

Originally posted by delrossi:
new 800 12" cdr wont burn at maximum speed
Some of the Philips 40x cds only burn at 4x not the rated 16x.
However on an external fw cd burner the exact same piece of media will burn at 16X. though some of the disks do burn at 16x. its intermitent.
Whats up??

i have the same issue.

[RodriCO2000]

Me too now that I have noticed, I have tried with two dofferent types of CD's and could only get 4x both times, this was using Toast. iTunes is almost the same speed but i dont know how to check the burning speed.

odd...

[flatcatch]

I can burn at full speed (16x) with my iBook 800 12.1". I've done so via iTunes (audio), Toast 5.1 (data), and the Finder (data). I know it's burning at 16x since the nearly-full 700MB data (or 80 minute audio) CDs are completing in a little under 5 minutes.

With Toast, when you click Record do you see 16x as a selectable option? All speeds up to 16x are available for me and the higher speeds are disabled. It's used 16x when I have selected "Maximum Speed", but I've also burned with 16x explicitly selected without any trouble.

I am using Yamaha "Professional Grade CD-R discs, 48x certified, 80 minutes, 700MB" - sounds fancy, but truth is they happened to be the cheapest ones at the store. Apple System Profiler says I have a CD-RW CRX820E by Sony.

None of the times I've burned a CD did it appear the programs were doing any sort of speed verification of the CD-R disc itself. Perhaps this can be done pretty much instantly? I don't know.


But wow! Three people with this problem (out of four posts!). Keep us posted with anything you find out.

[ThisGuy]

i used the blank CD that was shipped by apple and i got a 16x burn. the cheap CDs i bought from best buy (PNY 16x verified) burned only @ 4x. f PNY.
from ASP:
CD-RW/DVD-ROM:
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| Disc Burning : Fully supported. |
| Unit Number : 1 |
| ATA Device Type : atapi |
| Device Serial : |
| Device Revision : 1.3a |
| Product Identification : CD-RW CRX820E |
| Vendor Identification : SONY |
| |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

[Eug]

You guys should list the model of your drive. You may be comparing apples to oranges.

[RodriCO2000]

I tried burning again and it took forever to burn 650 mb of data, it was more than 15 minutes and this was done with a 40x rated CD-R!!!!!!

Also when I tried to select a speed in the Finder, only up to 4x was available, the rest was greyed out!!!

this seems weird to me!

here is the model of the drive according to System profiler

CD-RW CRX820E

So i dont know whats up, this was the same case with the Apple provided
CD-R

[delrossi]

Sony CRX820E
Rev 1.3a
the option to burn in Toast is there for 16X but it is in italics, hense the burner supports it but the media won't
However like I said it is intermitent.

[rjenkinson]

(bump.)

i also have an ibook with a sony drive which does not burn at any speed faster than 4x. does anyone know if this is likely to be a problem with CDR media, the combo drive's firmware/hardware, or burner support in OS X?

-r.

[flatcatch]

Originally posted by rjenkinson:
(bump.)

i also have an ibook with a sony drive which does not burn at any speed faster than 4x. does anyone know if this is likely to be a problem with CDR media, the combo drive's firmware/hardware, or burner support in OS X?

-r.

I tested with some older CD-Rs I have around and Toast only wanted to burn them at 8x (which sounds about right.. they are around 2 years old). I have some CD-RWs rated at 4X according to the packaging and Toast only wants to burn them at 4x - not surprising. Like I posted above though my Yamaha 48x rated CD-R discs burn at 16x.

Have you tried the Verbatim CD-R included with the iBook? Toast says it's rated for 16x as well (meaning the 16x option isn't italicized). At least it does on my iBook.

[delrossi]

I just tried TDK 48X no 16X only 4X.
I'm going to buy some disks that don't start with 4 in their speeds
like 24X or better yet 32X. It may sound silly but the drive or firmware may be lopping off the ones digit when it sees 40 or 48X and reverting to 4X
Just a silly hunch
if we can post the media types as well that will be great in narrowing this problem down.

[flatcatch]

One of you guys should email your probolems to Ric at http://www.macintouch.com and reference this thread. He posts "reader reports" dealing with problems, etc, and it would get a huge readership. It'd definitely show us if it's a wide spread problem.

[galarneau]

Yep, my new iBook 12.1" Combo has the same problem. With the blank CD Apple shipped with the PowerBook, I only get 1x, 2x, and 4x as burn options. With Imation media rated at 48x, I get up to 16x listed, but in italics (and it reverts to 4x when I burn anyway).

This is with the Sony CRX820E drive. I'm using Toast 5.2.... maybe Toast needs an update? Not a huge deal, but pretty poor attention to detail, Apple.

[chipchen]

first off... whatever speed the CDR is rated makes almost no difference.

could there possibly be a battery save option that reduces the speed to save energy?

also.. in a lot of CD burning software, there is an option for the program to burn at the "fastest possible" or you can set the speed. try finding this option and setting it to 16x. if this is the case, and it's defaulting you to a slow speed, it could be due to the other stuff you have running on your system or other things. it chooses the safest speed so that you won't experience any buffer underruns.

check this:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h...onID=anonymous|158246346

good luck.

[flatcatch]

Originally posted by chipchen:
first off... whatever speed the CDR is rated makes almost no difference.

That isn't really true. The kbase article you posted says that some CDs are rated for specific speed and you may need to reduce the speed. It also notes that in most cases iTunes can specifically detect the rated speed of the CD-R. This is apparently true for Toast as well, since it selects 16x as the max speed with my 48x Yamaha media, but if I insert a disc "officially" rated at 4x (as far as the packaging states) Toast will select 4x as the maximum speed (and mark all higher speeds in italics).

Perhaps there is some anomaly in the combo affected combo drives which misrepresents the rated speed of the media? That doesn't seem to be the entire case though (if at all) since other users here indicate that they can't burn at 16x successfully on sufficiently-rate media even if selected.

[rjenkinson]

i just thought i would add that it doesn't seem to matter what brand of media i use or whether i use a CDR or CDRW... both types will only burn at 4x max.

something's definitely not right.

-r.

[chipchen]

flatcatch... lemme explain my statement.. I meant it doesn't matter when you have FASTER rated CDRs in your burner. For instance... if you have a 16x burner... and you have 16x, 24x, 32x, 48x, and 52x rated CDR's you're really not going to see any difference.

HOWEVER, I didn't include this because I thought it was common sense, if you try to burn a CDR that is rated SLOWER, of course you may run into problems... buffer underruns, slower burn speeds, etc.

sorry i didn't make that clear.

[chipchen]

time to go to an apple store and talk to a mac genius. I hope you have warranty left. may be a motherboard issue or something like that.

[delrossi]

I went to the SOHO store and spent 45min talking to a "Genius". At first it was the typical it works in the doctors office, but then it the burner decided to only burn @ 4X rtight in front of his eyes.
Thats when he started to write me up for a repair.
I called AppleCare about the situation , This was the first that they have heard of this ( I suggest that all that are having problems shoud call as well). I asked them if there were enough drives in the pipline so that they will make them available to the repair dept. not yet as they are still pretty new.

[flatcatch]

Originally posted by chipchen:
flatcatch... lemme explain my statement.. I meant it doesn't matter when you have FASTER rated CDRs in your burner. For instance... if you have a 16x burner... and you have 16x, 24x, 32x, 48x, and 52x rated CDR's you're really not going to see any difference.

HOWEVER, I didn't include this because I thought it was common sense, if you try to burn a CDR that is rated SLOWER, of course you may run into problems... buffer underruns, slower burn speeds, etc.

sorry i didn't make that clear.

Got it. I think people (myself included) were saying "48x" just to describe what the speed at which the discs were rated - and that if Toast/iTunes reports that the max speed is consistently < 16x something is up with the drive.

Anyway - hopefully people will have good succcess like delrossi and get things in for repair.

[MSME]

I have one of the Toshiba equipped 12.1" 800 mhz iBooks. When I burn a full data CD using Toast, it seems to be taking around 7 minutes (just to write the data, not 'finish up'). I have no problems selecting 16x as the burn speed, in fact, that's what Toast selects by default every time. So it seems like my iBook is taking longer to write data than is theoretically possible. It seems strange to me . . .

[RodriCO2000]

I have tried with many types of media and brands and I STILL can only burn at 4x both in iTunes and Toast, Finder takes even longer.

Defiently something wrong is with these machines!!

[rjenkinson]

bump. are there any solutions floating around out there? i did try the advice about zapping the PRAM, but it had no effect.

-r.

[delrossi]

There is a Petition to sign
http://www.petitiononline.com/combo4x
Please get involved

[hoover]

I have the same ibook and the same problem as the original poster. Whenever I insert any kind of blank including the one that came with my ibook it will only give me the option of burning at 4 x or lower. I tried holding down the ibook while I insert a cd thinking our problem might be due to excessive vibration, lo and behold finder, diskcopy and itunes all gave me the option of burning at 16x. This has worked for the last 3 cd's I've burned including cheep noname blanks.

[mikemako]

Hi.. are people still having this problem? I wasn't experiencing it until recently- for the first few months after I bought the 800MHz iBook it would burn at 16X.. but just a few weeks ago (without changing the brand or type of CD-Rs I use) it started burning at only 4X!

I tried the strange trick I read somewhere of turning the iBook on it's side right after inserting the CD-R until it spins up. If I do that I can get it to burn at 8X.

I don't really want to spend $250 on Apple Care so they'll help me, I would rather just spend it on a new combo drive if that is what's necessary. Does anyone have any suggestion, or advice from their own experience?

Great Thanks to ya!

[kayetie]

My "Sony CD-RW CRX820E" combo drive burned at 16x upon receiving with the apple supplied "Verbatim" 32x rated cd-r. After a while it stopped burning at that speed and went down to 4x. I returned my iBook to apple for repair. They returned it saying nothing was wrong with the burner.

After A LOT of time testing, buying different speed cd-r disks, I found that this particular drive would not burn above 16x on any cd-r disk rated above the speed of 32x. I now have "Sony", and "Digital Research" cd-r disks rated for 32x that are burning at my 16x speed.

I believe this burning issue has to do with the burner / cd-r becoming unstable at speeds above the 32x rated disks. A limitation of the combo drive. For instance, if you stick a 48x cd-r in the drive you will notice that the drive spin up is more noisey, or unstable. The drive and machine will vibrate much more. I think the drive, or disk becomes unstable when trying to spin up the disk on the 48x rated speed cd-r. Therefore the auto detect part of the burner picks up an anomaly, and changing the burn setting to 4x only.

If anyone can get ANY 40x or higher disks to burn consistantly at 16x please let me know.

[delrossi]

I was looking over the threads regarding this problem as my 1 year anniversary is up this weekend and I wanted to know if I should get Applecare or not .

Well the above poster seems to have hit on the solution it was the higher speed media.
specifically the 48X speed stuff. I went to my local Staples and picked up Maxell 650 40X
gold label 100 disk spindle pack, and popped it in, voila ! 16X.
So I dug down deeper into the spindle and picked out a few more samples lo and behold most of them tested at 16X (using Toast 6.01 Disk info dialog) some did report 4X but the majority do repot 16X. so Apple has been right that it seems to be the media they just didn't state using slower rated disks.
I haven't ordered from theese people but I will soon as they have slower rated media. http://www.meritline.com/meritline/80min700mb.html
good luck to all
mdr