This had been bugging me enough that it's time to ask the all-knowing and all-seeing masses for advice. The problem concerns the reliability of my Plextor drive. If I rip with AudioGrabber, the Plextor runs near its full speed (16x on the inside to 30x on the outside of the CD). But, on some CDs, on the outside tracks, the computer might wedge or crash. This problem was awful when I was using the Win2000 drivers, and improved markedly when I switched to the VOB ASAPI drivers. But, it didn't go away.

So, I switched to EAC. EAC has never crashed my computer, which is nice, but I don't get anywhere near the speed I got with AudioGrabber. EAC typically reports extraction between 4x and 6x, using the "secure mode". It will go a little faster in the other modes, but never anywhere close to what AudioGrabber would get. On "troublesome" CDs, EAC slows down. A lot. It seems like it spins up the drive, tries to read one block, then spins the drive down again. When it gets into this mode, the whole computer becomes unresponsive, although it usually does ultimately succeed.

So, I started using my Toshiba DVD instead of the Plextor. The Toshiba runs maybe 25% slower than the Plextor, but it never has the degenerate problems on "troublesome" discs.

As such, I'm looking for advice. What's the source of my problem? Is this a known-bad Plextor product? Does it just need a newer firmware upgrade? Could this be a problem with my on-board IDE controller? (I've got a Promise ATA-100 controller that I could try.)

Thoughts anyone?


The relevant parts of my computer:
(Hardware) 1.3GHz Athlon clone, Gigabyte motherboard on-board IDE, Plextor PlexWriter 16/10/40A (with the 1.0.3 firmware), Toshiba cheapo DVD-ROM (same IDE channel as the Plextor)

(Software) Win2000 (with recent patches), EAC 0.9b11, ASAPI drivers from VOB (as recommended by EAC)

I'm not positive, but I think there were some revisions of the 16x plextor drives that were, how shall I say it, 'tempramental.'

I have the 12x Plextor and there are only 1 or 2 discs that have a problem when reading the outside tracks, which I always thought was some kind of ultraviolet damage, since it only ever happened to discs that were left in my car for a while. My extraction speed drops to around 0.1x at that point, with the drive spinning up and down, similar to the way you describe.

Perhaps it's just those "troublesome" discs. I would just use the Toshiba on those instead.

Try grabbing the lastest firmware from: http://www.plextor.com/english/support/downloads/firm_1610.html

Maybe that will fix your problem.

Sean