New SuperDrive is really super

[bousozoku]

After three years of having my dual G4/800, I replaced the SuperDrive with a new Pioneer DVR-109/A09 drive. I didn't realise that it was so bad and that stems from it being something new to me back in 2002.

Recently, I was attempting to repair my hard drive using Tech Tool Pro 4 and the analysis took something like 16 hours. Well, it's not been 6 hours yet and TTP4 is creating the replacement volume structures now.

I'm surprised how much time it spent using the drive. It's amazing that I had that sort of patience.

Pioneer certainly makes good drives...at least, the ones that are good...are good. 🙂

It's amazing to me that the whole system seems more responsive. It wouldn't seem probable that the optical drive would cause problems for the hard drives.

 

[mad jew]

It's interesting to hear that. We're always discussing the benefits of RAM, faster hard drives and GPUs but we never really hear anything about optical drive speed. To be honest, I don't use mine all that much so I doubt I'd notice the differences you have. Nevertheless, I'm quite shocked the speed difference is all that large.

Did you replace the drive because it was faulty or because you needed more speed? 🙂

It's amazing to me that the whole system seems more responsive. It wouldn't seem probable that the optical drive would cause problems for the hard drives.

Okay, surely that's gotta just be the placebo effect. 😛

 

[shadowmoses]

Sometimes bad drives can wreak havoc with the system, i had the same problem wehn i put a NEC superdrive in my eMac, as soon as i replaced it with a pioneer my system would be much more reliable when reading CD's DVD's and using apps like disk utility,

Shadow

 

[bousozoku]

It's interesting to hear that. We're always discussing the benefits of RAM, faster hard drives and GPUs but we never really hear anything about optical drive speed. To be honest, I don't use mine all that much so I doubt I'd notice the differences you have. Nevertheless, I'm quite shocked the speed difference is all that large.

Did you replace the drive because it was faulty or because you needed more speed? 🙂

Okay, surely that's gotta just be the placebo effect. 😛

It was faulty. It wouldn't read CDs or CD-ROMs most of the time, but it seemed to be okay with DVDs. I assumed that the drive had some different technology for each media simply because it acted like that.

Funny about the volume repair. Last time, it froze after 16 hours, when I chose to repair the volume problems because it couldn't read the CD-ROM in the drive. This time, the analysis only took about 2.5 hours but as I'm writing, the repair is still continuing and it's working at a 1-3 blocks at a time pace. Obviously, a full defragmentation would speed this somewhat, but wouldn't likely provide much other improvement. However, once the file system starts using the extent area, it gets really slow.

 

[bousozoku]

What a mess! Twenty minutes ago, I had to re-boot the system as the application seemed to have crashed when it was about 99 percent finished. 18 hours lost? No sweat, right? DiskWarrior, anyone?

Not only was the time lost. My drive will no longer boot. It's even gone so bad that I'm currently using Safari. 🙁 Hope that my copied Firefox preferences will work.

Anyone know of a way to take the contents from a 160 GB drive and put them on an 80 GB drive, just in case things have really gone wrong?

 

[mad jew]

I'm a little confused. Is it the hard drive, the optical drive or both that's wrecked? Can you get Target Disk Mode to work? 🙂

 

[DevilDog]

What is the best brand of DVD media for a SuperDrive while you all are at it?

 

[Blue Velvet]

What is the best brand of DVD media for a SuperDrive while you all are at it?

We use Sony and Verbatim disks at work.


Edit: Bous? Have you managed to get the drive working with DVD player and iLife apps by any chance?

 

[bousozoku]

I'm a little confused. Is it the hard drive, the optical drive or both that's wrecked? Can you get Target Disk Mode to work? 🙂

Well, it was both. The optical drive was physically unable to read CDs most of the time. My 160 GB hard drive had volume structure problems and I needed to boot from the TTP4 CD-ROM to repair it, but because the optical wasn't working with CD-ROMs, I couldn't boot it to do the repair.

After all that, I tried to repair but the application froze toward the end, so now the 160 GB drive is unable to be used as a startup drive, for whatever reason.

I've not tried Target Disk mode but I've been transfering things manually from one drive to the other. However, I'm about out of space on the 80 GB drive.

What is the best brand of DVD media for a SuperDrive while you all are at it?

Imation, Yamaha, Fuji. Apple should be, it's premium-priced. Match your media speed with your drive speed.

 

[bousozoku]

I've been disk recovery software shopping and came home with Prosoft Drive Genius instead of DiskWarrior. According to the Apple employee at CompUSA, Drive Genius is a much better and quicker application than DiskWarrior. He said that it was the same price but I'm afraid that CompUSA bumped the price up $30, so I drove away $5 of gasoline to go to the Apple store.

We'll see whether it can repair the volume structures or not. This should be interesting.

 

[bousozoku]

Drive Genius worked out the problems within several minutes, not hours and re-built the volume structures. I considered de-fragmenting but didn't want to tempt fate. I selected the 160 GB drive and restarted.

The machine re-booted as well as ever, though I'm not sure that's a good thing or not lately, since it wasn't showing signs of problems. I decided to check the 80 GB from which I had been running for a day or so. I was surprised to find that there were problems and stunned to find that they couldn't be fixed at all.

I've re-formatted that drive and I'm planning to restore the drive from the original discs included with the machine. Then, I can get all of my original applications running again and back up things so I never have to access Mac OS 9 again--the restore discs use Mac OS 9.

Oh, and if all that weren't enough, I tried to boot from the Drive Genius CD and the system complained that it wasn't a format it recognised. This after I installed it on two different drives. 😱