Pioneer 118L + Mac Pro 2,1 = frustration

[prodfilms]

Hi I have a mac pro 2,1. Recently the original superdrive went bad so I replaced it with a Pioneer 118L. In fact I replaced it with two Pioneer 118Ls so I could burn two DVDs at once.

Drives both work fine sometimes... after the drives burn two or three DVDs one of the drives will fail. I am burning a .cdr image from disk utillity.

When the 'closing session' dialogue box appears in the final stages of a burn it goes no further. The disk spins with speeed bursts every couple of seconds and around five minutes later the disk will eject. And the burn was not successful.

I run a video production business so burning DVDs efficiently is a must. At the moment I am throwing away every 5th DVD and rebooting the system when the burn freezes.

Any theories or solutions out there? I have to burn 70 DVDs tomorrow and am not loking forward to the frustration ahead.

Thanks,

Dan

 

[hughvane]

Welcome to Mac-Forums!

Your third para suggests the question: are you testing with different media brands? There's a lot of debate over which is better/best, but general consensus points to perhaps two or three brands.

Second question: does the failure occur when you're burning two disks simultaneously; and have you tested using just one burner at a time?

Do you have maximum RAM in your Mac Pro? [and what are its specs?]

 

[prodfilms]

Welcome to Mac-Forums!

Your third para suggests the question: are you testing with different media brands? There's a lot of debate over which is better/best, but general consensus points to perhaps two or three brands.

Second question: does the failure occur when you're burning two disks simultaneously; and have you tested using just one burner at a time? ]

I have been using three brands. Two cheapies and Verbatim DVD-R. I have faith in Verbatim. However all three brands look identical and may have been mixed up contaminating any test. I will make it my mission to buy 100 Taiyo Yuden Printable DVD-Rs this morn and burn from one drive.. if I have consistent success (10 in a row) I will try both drives.

My mac pro has 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 10GB 667MHz RAM (Upgradable to 16GB) and I am running Mac OS X 10.6.2.

Thanks for your help thus far hughvane.

 

[hughvane]

Give Imation a shot too - rated highly amongst more than just some. FWIW - I use TDK and Ricoh, but the latter are quite old, and I'm not certain they're made any more. I believe, but have no first-hand experience of them, that Taiyo are in the upper shelves of disk quality.

10 Gb RAM should be sufficient for tandem-burning, but it is a memory-intensive operation (watch your Activity monitor).

 

[prodfilms]

The results are in... I have almost gone through the entire 100 Taiyo Yuden DVDs and not one coaster. Tandem-burning too.

I will never buy cheap or Verbatim DVDs agin... not worth the hassle.

Taiyo Yuden were the most expensive DVDs I found. I am tempted to work backwards from there and experiment with cheaper brands like TDK. But I dont think I will. Just happy to get quality DVDs out of my machine... at whatever costs.

Thanks for helping to put things in perspective hughvane.

 

[prodfilms]

Oh... and the thing that got me pointing the finger at the drive and not the media in the first place was the same cheap media worked on the old apple superdrive before it died. The new pioneer drive(s) would not consistently write successfully onto the same cheap media.

Should I be upset that pioneer has quality taste in DVD media... naaaaaaaa.

Problem solved.