[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?

[mjg59]

A lot of CDs aren't in perfect condition, either because of scratches or things like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc_bronzing. When faced with damaged data, the quality of the drive and its firmware will influence whether the data stream corresponds to the original content or not.

[simonklitj]

A little interested! What exactly are FIFO buffers?

[mulmen]

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