Hi everyone, Today, we will be unboxing the SilverStone TOB04 9.5mm Slim Optical Blu-Ray Writer. This is yet another Blu-Ray Writer for internal 9.5mm optical drive bays. This drive is able to burn all major optical drive formats, including BDXL discs. Upon opening it, we see it comes with a slim SATA cable that helps us if we choose to use it in a desktop machine if it has a slot for a drive like this, or other compatible 5.25…
Hi everyone, Today, I’ll show you how to update the LiteOn DU-8A5LH firmware. This is important as firmware updates should improve the drive operation, including better reading and burning stability. Recently, I tried to burn a SmartBuy DVD+R DL disc but it failed at the beginning of the 2nd layer. The drive had an older firmware, so I updated it and we’ll see if this improves double layer burning at another post. For now, let’s see the steps to update…
Hi everyone, Today, we will see how well a SmartBuy DVD+R DL disc burns in the LiteOn DU-8A5LH drive: This unit supports burning these discs at a speed of 3x, 4x and 6x. This post will focus on a disc burned at 6x. Burning the disc seemed to have gone well until it switched to the 2nd disc layer: Unfortunately, the drive could not burn this disc successfully. I retried it and it seems this time it worked: This drive…
So, now that we have successfully downloaded the Windows UUP files, created the ISO image, and optionally patched the Windows 11 ISO, now it’s time to burn it to a DVD. While today most people prefer to make a bootable USB drive, burning the image to a DVD have the advantage of archiving it for later use, while a USB drive may be formatted later for additional use. I always prefer to burn the images to disc because they provide…
Hi everyone, Today, I’ll show you how to update the Pioneer DVR-XD09 firmware. This is important as firmware updates should improve the drive operation, including better reading and burning stability. This Pioneer DVR-XD09 drive came with the 1.02 firmware. The latest firmware available for this drive is 1.05. To download and update it, we first need to go to Pioneer’s optical drive firmware update download page. We will scroll down until we see the firmware file for our DVR-X09 drive….
Hi everyone, After playing around with the Samsung SE-506 drive as well as the Pioneer DVR-XD09, they can both scan discs. The Samsung SE-506 being a Blu-Ray drive, can also scan those discs. This is great because it’s probably one of the very few slim drives that supports such feature. Unfortunately, the Pioneer DVR-XD09 cannot scan double layer DVDs. It simply stops scanning at the layer break and reports a massive spike of errors at that segment. However, it works…
Hi everyone, Today, we’ll see how well the PlexDisc DVD+R discs burns in the HP version of the LG GT80N optical drive: We will be using ImgBurn to perform the writing and verification. It reports the media code to be OPTODISC-R16-00 and supports writing at 4x and 8x. We will be burning it at 8x: The drive burned the disc using a CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) strategy, starting at about 3.3x and gradually going up until reaching 8x: The disc…
Hi everyone, Today, we will be burning a PlexDisc DVD+R disc in the LG GP96YB70 external slim drive: This drive supports burning these discs at 4x and 8x. We will be burning it at 8x: This unit supports setting the DVD+R Book Type to DVD-ROM. This is useful as this can improve the disc compatibility with older drives: The drive was able to burn the disc successfully: And verified it correctly: The drive burns the disc in Constant Angular Velocity…
Hi everyone, Today, we will be attempting again to burn a PlexDisc DVD+R disc in the LG BP50NB40 crossflashed to the BP60NB10 firmware 1.02. This time, we will burn the disc at a speed of 2.4x, the slowest and only speed it allows us to use besides the 8x speed we used before: As we can see, the drive only supports either burning the disc at 2.4x or 8x. We will use the 2.4x: The burning process was successful, but…
Hi everyone, Today, we will see the Samsung SE-506 optical drive: This is an External Blu-Ray Writer that can burn CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray and Blu-Ray XL media. I could not find a data sheet with the supported write speeds. This drive is already discontinued. ImgBurn reports that the drive can read and burn all of the popular disc types: This drive is a standard slim tray-loading device: It uses a Micro USB connector: Here, we can see the optical mechanism:…