I have 2 problems with the Sony Dru500ax... First I am trying to backup Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets with Dvd x copy... It takes 48 minutes to read one half of the disk! That is only half of the movie... Is there anyway to increase the speed... I have a dell dimension 4300 1.5 gigs and 256 megs of ram and windows xp... Also I am trying to update the firmware but when I click Start Update on the firmware window nothing happens.. Has anyone else had that problem?
I use a Pioneer 16x DVD Reader to do my reads as it is alot faster than my Sony DRU-500AX. I would assume you are in the same situation the drive just doesn't read as fast as a standalone higher speed reader.
Do yourself a favor and don't use the 500A_20f Firmware Upgrade. I overwrote the original 500A_10f Upgrade with the new 20f Upgrade and now DVD-R's that I could originally write at 2X will only write at 1X. If you have original 500A_10f.exe please e-mail me a copy so I can get my Burner back to normal. Thardy
You can pick 1.0f firmware at: http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_firmware.php?category=4&manufactor=30 I didn't try downgrading myself though.
I did the upgrade and everything works fine, as promised some DVD-R discs do 1x but Sonys DVD-RW does 2.4x seems to depend on the media the firmware may be more sensitive to media, which means that the engineers designed it to drop speed if the media is not 100 % sure to burn OK at higher speeds.. (just a guess)
The problem I had with 2f was that DVD-R's that would write 2x with 1f upgrade would only write 1x with 2f upgrade. Switched back to 1f everything ok now back to 2x.
