[amichal]

I never shipped gold floppies but I did ship golden master CDs on a 1x (maybe 2x?) writer for a very early ebook publisher (sometime in late 1990s). I was young and inexperienced in the business side of things. The machine doing it was underpowered and frequently overran it' buffer. I remember that one late night when more sr folks had gone for drinks and i was left to do burn, I went through a stack of 16+ blanks trying to get a single disk to verify. This took hours and at the time blanks were something like 20$ each. I spent the whole night stressing I would get in trouble for spending so much and maybe I should have waited for someone who knew the process better. CTO told me the next day what being a single day late to get them to mfg would have cost and I felt better.

[hinkley]

The senior guys should not have gone for drinks until someone had verified the copy. They could have dinked around the office for an hour until the first one failed. You got left holding the bag. A very expensive one from the sounds of it.

[amichal]

Yeah, that particular configuration of SR guys didn't really work out. Why they went drinking and left me to finish up is a longer story, life lesson. I quit within months and went to work with a couple of the more dedicated of the bunch.

[cranesan]

Were you burning CDs with enough contents to get close to the capacity of the disk? (~650mb-700mb?)

I had a similar issue, also in the late 1990s, so I understand the stress around wasting those $20 blanks. Found out a few years later that the drives were defective, and would often (but not always!) have buffer errors when burning discs close to capacity. (something that you'd often WANT to do, to maximize the value you're getting from those $20 blanks!)

There was a class action lawsuit, and I eventually got a replacement drive (no relief for those wasted expensive, blanks). But the vindication that it was defective hardware, and nothing I did wrong helps. The manufacturer of the drive was Philips/Magnavox, but there were some other brands that were all linked back to this same defect that the class action lawsuit covered.

[serf]

>Found out a few years later that the drives were defective, and would often (but not always!) have buffer errors when burning discs close to capacity

there was a slew of software hacks in most cd burning suites that'd attempt to deal with that problem across the industry.

believe it or not : time dependent FIFO buffers are capital H Hard. Or at least they were back then.. I suspect the damage done by poorly constructed FIFO buffers now is just more hidden, not exactly lessened.

[kevin_thibedeau]

I was bulk ripping CDs a few months ago and was running multiple SCSI drives to increase my throughput. The current Linux SCSI drivers will lock up the bus when you insert a disc and ruin any transfers already in progress on another drive. You'd think something like that would have been resolved at this point.

[dylan604]

An actual SCSI device? And you're complaining about "by now". How old of hardware are you using? "By now" fixes are included in modern hardware on USB.

[kevin_thibedeau]

I have a number of Plextor CD-ROM drives that are more desirable than DVD-ROM for CD audio extraction. I have one USB Plextor but they command a high resale price. The point is that basic bus management should be sorted out and it clearly isn't.

[BuildTheRobots]

> I have a number of Plextor CD-ROM drives that are more desirable than DVD-ROM for CD audio extraction

If you're pulling a digital bit-stream off a disk then why does the reader matter?

[simonklitj]

A little interested! What exactly are FIFO buffers?

[mulmen]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFO_(computing_and_electron...