[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.

[BuildTheRobots]

Thanks for the explanation - I misinterpreted the OC to be about audio quality rather than just trying to recover data from damaged media.

[simonklitj]

A little interested! What exactly are FIFO buffers?

[mulmen]

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