DVD-R burning on Mac OS X very unreliable

Setup:

• QPS external FireWire DVD-RW drive with Pioneer DVR-103 drive (an older version of QPS's DVD2i)
  
• PowerBook G4/500MHz/768MB/30GB
  
• Mac OS X 10.2.6
  
• Roxio Toast Titanium 5.2 software
  
• CharisMac Discribe 5.0.36 software

In the past, I had high failure rates with the above hardware but after having upgraded the Pioneer DVR-103's firmware, having successfully burned about 10 DVD-Rs on my Window 2000 PC using DVD X Copy Xpress, and using Imation-branded DVD-R media, I was hoping to be able to reliably backup the ton of digital photos that I have on my Mac onto DVD-Rs. Disappointingly, however, out of 10 tries using slightly different setups each time, only 2 were successful (80% failure rate!). Yes, just yesterday, 8 DVD-R discs were wasted (or turned into "coasters", as they say)!

After having read the DVD problems and fixes that many others reported on Macintouch.com, I made sure that I: (1) unticked the "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver preference pane; (2) selected no more than 3GB of data to backup; and (3) left the PowerBook alone with only the burning sofware running while burning. When using Toast, I tried burning with and without "Buffer Underrun Protection" and at 1x and 2x speeds — all settings combinations failed. Initially, I tried burning with data stored on an external 3.5" FireWire hard disk. I then tried burning with all the data stored on my PowerBook's internal hard disk with only the DVD burner connected on FireWire. I got 1 successful burn that way. But then subsequent tries that way were unsuccessful. I also tried different FireWire cables and different software (CharisMac's Discribe) but the various combinations didn't help.

What would happen is the DVD burner would simply stop burning (burn LED indicator would go off) and the software would "hang" anywhere between 8 to 45 minutes after starting the burn process. I guess I could try different media but then again, I successfully burnt 10 or so DVD-Rs on my PC using the same DVD burner and media. I might try burning the files using my PC with Nero burning software.

At this point, I'm extremely frustrated, yet am tempted to buy a new Pioneer DVR-105/A05 DVD-RW burner.

Posted by derek at June 09, 2003 12:15 PM