OT - 4x drive burning at 8x?

[belsonc]

Quick question for all of you... I have a DVD+-RW that will burn at 4x, but one of my programs has an option to burn at 8x... if I tried that, would I fry my drive? I'm tempted to try, but Dell did right by me when they replaced my old laptop with a better one, and I'm not looking to mess anything up on this one...

[serz]

Hm.. I don't think you can do that, isn't that limited by the hardware itself? I mean.. the speed for reading/writting..

[belsonc]

Well, what I'm looking to avoid doing is overloading the drive or something like that - basically, I don't want to burn out the drive by trying to burn it too fast.

[Bubba56]

I don't think you can do it, I am not 100% positive but if youtried to use the software's 8x speed (probably do-able on a desktop or a newer burner) I would think you would get a message or error like "your hardware does not support this speed" or something like that?!?! You CAN force a higher speed burn to MEDIA but I don't think you can force your hardware to go faster... ok not burners, I know you can overclock cpu's and gpu's :P

In any event I wouldn't try, sticking with the stock speed will produce a more reliable burn anywho :)

BUT.. don't quote me, maybe it can be done and I just proved my ignorance again?!?!!? good luck

[belsonc]

No, that was a good enough answer for me. Maybe one day when I'm depressed and I don't really care what happens, I'll try it. ;)

-CB

[Icarus]

If you try to burn at 8x on a 4x drive, the drive will burn at it's maximum speed...4x

You won't do any damage trying it and most burning software will give you output like "hardware doesn't support 24x, changing speed to 4x" or something like that...

The drive won't let you fry it, that's what firmware prevents ;)

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by Icarus
The drive won't let you fry it, that's what firmware prevents ;) Well... unless the firmware interprets "flush your buffers" as "upgrade yourself with the data that's coming down the IDE cable next", like in certain (was it LG?) CD-ROM drives...

:p

[Icarus]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that little problem a couple years ago

bwkaz, didn't that one actully bite you the arse too?
no wait, it was a Mandrake bug and you'd never use that! :p

[bwkaz]

No, I don't use LG drives. ;)

(Plus, I didn't have a Just Plain CD-ROM Drive, either. It was a burner.)

As for Mandrake... I used to use it, way back when -- a couple years before this issue came up, at least.