Technically minded Weblog

My BD-RE drive arrived a few days ago. Well, the drive itself is nothing special, it looks like any ordinary DVD/CD drive except for being able to write to BD-R and BD-RE (and the Blu-Ray Disc logo ofcourse).
The drive is made by LG-Hitachi. It’s a 8x burner. Too bad some new models of this drive arrived just after I’ve bought this drive.

I also bought 5 BD-R to test the drive. This is where the problems started.
The drive did not like those BD-Rs. Tried burning at 2x, it went to around 80% and then the drive decided to uninstall itself from system (perhaps due to bad SATA cable). Burned another disc (with the same cable), this time it was a success (somewhat), but due to bad disc a few sectors got corrupted.
Replaced SATA cable. I had 3 BD-Rs left so I’ve tried burning some data to them. The drive burned them at around 1.5-1.7x (these were 4x BD-Rs) and always encountered a write error at around 75-80% accompanied by a click-click noise from the drive (like if it was trying to recover from error).
But at least one burn was successful. So the drive should be OK (but we can’t be sure until we try to burn some more discs).
I have one of DVD-R DL discs made by the same company (InfoSource). It’s ok but none of my drives like it (they all read it really slowly). It seems that InfoSource BD-Rs are no better than their DVD-Rs.
I returned bad BD-R discs to the shop.
Too bad Verbatim BD-Rs are really expensive here.
I will have to find some better BD-Rs and try burning them.

P.S.: My Twitter is here.

Have some better news to post. Got my money back to my account.
Ordered a LG BD burner and a Logitech laser mouse (my second PC’s mouse is dead and my backup mouse is old and crappy).
The site where I ordered does not require registration but has a strange policy of having the manager contact you before you pay (possibly, to confirm that things you have ordered are in-stock). The good thing that they will ship my items to me, so I don’t have to go anywhere to get them (the site where I usually buy everything PC related charges too much for a home delivery).
I will wait now, and post here when there’s anything new.

P.S.: I will soon get rid of that Giveawayoftheday.com ticker image if they continue to post crappy software.

I found where to buy a BD-RE drive locally. The drive is made LG and does 8x. The cdfreaks review of this drive looked good for me and I’ve decided to buy it.
It’s a bit older model but it’s 8x so it should be OK.
But I also have some bad news.
I wanted to deposit some cash to my bank account but the person, who accepted my money, mixed up two last numbers of my personal id so the money got deposited to the wrong account. Dammit I’m going to scream this: SUCH MISTAKE IS UNACCEPTABLE !!! The cashier did not even bother to check account holder’s name before depositing the money.
Now I can’t order my hardware. I’ll have to wait until I get my money back (I hope, not “if I get my money back”).
Well this shows at least one thing: Humans who work in supermarkets or even banks are not robots.
I hope I will have some better news for posting in my next blog post.

That’s all for now.