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Best friendly drive to buy

SamuriHL said:
As I said, because the NS60 is an official drive. The only way to make an NS60 work with AnyDVD is to flash a UHD friendly firmware. If you care about burning discs, you may want to keep it in the family. i.e. flash the NS55 MK firmware. If you don't care about burning discs, then yes, you can cross flash the ASUS MK firmware on it. That's the only way to get it to work with AnyDVD.
Click to expand...

No, don't care about disc burning - full res rips to the Synology for Zidoo UHD2000 playback...

So I'll do the 3.10MK on the 16D1HT and LG 16NS60 for AnyDVD/MakeMKV.

For DVDFab, I have another set of 16D1HT and LG 16NS60 drives - Do you have a recommendation on the best patch for them? I mean, their 1.00 patch works on the LG, but it seems somewhat slow to me... the ASUS is 3.02 unpatched, but I think that should work with DVD Fab straight up, correct

Actually am I correct that 3.02 16D1HT would work with all three? Or am I forgetting something...? Thanks
 
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I have the ASUS BW-16D1HT and out of maybe 120 discs only 3 or 4 I've not been able to read as they get stuck on a bad sector. I've gotten replacements for a few and they work but I'd like to get a second drive and wondered if there is one that has better luck with hard to read discs?
 
I'm very much liking my archgon bu40n external USB drive. Damn thing's a tank. I downgraded it to firmware 1.00 when I got it and it's now my go to drive. In fact, Best Buy just rejected my request to return 300 because "it was opened". Um, yea, I opened it to find that the disc was loose in the box and scratched. They sent it back to me. Since they sent it back to me I'm attempting to get a stable rip of the thing at least once. I have my doubts though. Scratched discs are pretty well screwed.
 
I'd keep bugging Best Buy but my not be worth your time. :(

Like MartinCottrell posted that he tried a disc on his back up ASUS BW-16D1HT and it worked. So maybe the drives age out or even the same make and model can do better or worse on the same disc.

Is the is one you have? https://www.amazon.com/Archgon-Premium-Aluminum-External-Apple-MacBook/dp/B07BC9F98J
Is there only a certain vintage that can be downgraded?

I'd like to get another internal drive. I messaged that guy on makemkv.com and he is suggesting an LG BU40N of some kind. He said the "NS60 as they are dying prematurely like flies". ???

It one of the flippin' GOT S3 discs. All the others are ok and don't make any loud sound like some others did and the surface looks perfect but it just stops with the good old Read Error Sectors message 2% in. :(
 
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Funny you should say the BW16D1HT. I cleaned the living crap out of the disc and my bu40n wouldn't touch it even at 2x. As a half hearted joke I stuck the disc in my BW16D1HT drive with NS60 1.00 firmware and I'm reading it at 2x as we speak. So far knock on wood. I'm pretty sure I tried that when I first got the disc but whatever works. I just want to read it so I can make an MKV out of it and be done with it. So we'll see how that goes.

And yes, that's the exact drive I got. It came with 1.02 which was super simple to downgrade but even if it comes with something higher it can be downgraded. It's an awesome little drive. It will NOT work with AnyDVD so be careful if that's your intention. That's an official drive and works well with other software. And trust me, I'm WELL aware of the GoT discs. I had to get a replacement set myself before I could read them all. Royal pain in the....uh, anyway.

As for the NS60, it's not the drive that's dying. LibreDrive is doing something screwy to these drives when it encounters any kind of read error. I'm wondering if the latest version of MakeMKV fixes that. But that's not a discussion for this forum.
 
And my ISO failed. F*** best buy. I'm so irritated it's not even funny.
 
Yes I wanted another drive to use with AnyDVD.

I think I found the issue, had to get the light just right to see it. :(

I'd still like to get a backup for the ASUS is there was one that would do better.
 

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The studio is already sick of me. it's Warner Brothers and I have a complaint in with them right now about a much bigger problem. The Two Towers discs in my LOTR steel book collection were missing when I opened the set. Best Buy was completely useless so I contacted WB and right now due to COVID their offices are closed. However they said once they can get back to the office they'll send me out a set of discs that are missing. I have a Harry Potter disc that's scratched that they claimed they were going to send me a replacement but never did. The LOTR missing discs are the most pressing issue I need to get solved. 300 is whatever. I have the digital code so I can watch it in 4k but seriously I'd just like to get one rip. I flashed back to 3.02 on the ASUS and that made it worse. I'm trying in my original NS60 right now. I don't even think my UB820 will play it. It's got a nice circular scratch that can't be fixed. That was right out of the package.
 
SamuriHL said:
<snip>

As a half hearted joke I stuck the disc in my BW16D1HT drive with NS60 1.00 firmware and I'm reading it at 2x as we speak

<snip>
Click to expand...

Does that mean that NS60 is compatible with BW-16 and NS55 drives? I might give it a try as I've got one of the GOT discs that's being a royal pain (incidentally, I had great success with 3.10-MK and 1.05-MK for ASUS and LG respectively, I'll do a longer post in another thread to which this is relevant soon)
 
SamuriHL said:
All these drives are based on the same chipset. So you can cross flash the firmware for the desktop drives, yes.
Click to expand...

Great, I'll give it a go. Just as a "preview" to the longer post: ejecting the disc, closing the tray back might get rid of the "bad sector" problems (my hypothesis is that it's some kind of a disc--laser calibration error, happened to me with one disc, several several eject-close cycles later it worked, with another disc, 1.05-MK seems to have a better calibration algo/table/magic than 3.10-MK with an NS55 (310 didn't work 105 gone through the problematic area ok, just need to verify the hashes once it's complete), just one disc left that's being a pain for me).
 
I can follow that pattern. I use LibreDrive to disable bus encryption so I can use other tools to make a protected ISO. As soon as I eject the disc it'll disable LibreDrive. I suppose I could attempt to re-enable it before attempting to retry but that doesn't seem likely to work. This disc is simply toast.
 
SamuriHL said:
I can follow that pattern. I use LibreDrive to disable bus encryption so I can use other tools to make a protected ISO. As soon as I eject the disc it'll disable LibreDrive. I suppose I could attempt to re-enable it before attempting to retry but that doesn't seem likely to work. This disc is simply toast.
Click to expand...

Was meant to add that every time you insert a disc the drive seems to recalibrate the laser to the disc anew (you can actually tell how well it's going to work by the sound the laser head makes, if it's similar sound to the old HDD head clunking (which is also HDD heads unable to calibrate to the platters) then you're likely going to struggle)). If you're getting different sectors being reported as bad (as I have) it's most likely laser issues.
 
It's not a laser issue in my case. I have 4 drives. They're all failing on this disc. The scratches aren't going to allow it to be read. I'm just screwed at this point because best buy was a bunch of uselessness so I'm just doing whatever I can to try to get one clean (or even semi-clean at this point) read. I haven't yet gotten to the desperate tricks for bad discs just yet. But I may get there soon.
 
SamuriHL said:
It's not a laser issue in my case. I have 4 drives. They're all failing on this disc. The scratches aren't going to allow it to be read. I'm just screwed at this point because best buy was a bunch of uselessness so I'm just doing whatever I can to try to get one clean (or even semi-clean at this point) read. I haven't yet gotten to the desperate tricks for bad discs just yet. But I may get there soon.
Click to expand...

Yup, I suspect scratches with TL discs is going to be a showstopper no matter how good your laser calibration is...
 
The ONLY time I've had my bu40n drive fail is on discs that are physically damaged. And it won't touch this disc.
 
SamuriHL said:
If you want an AnyDVD drive, get an NS40 and drop 1.02-MK on it and call it a day.
Click to expand...

What do you like about the NS40? Do you have to boot into a different OS or something to update the firmware?

"As long as it's an NS40 with a SVC code of NS50 on the label then it'll work fine. The older version of the NS40 will be bricked trying to flash a UHD friendly firmware to it. So you just have to be more careful with that one."

As long as it an old model "NS40" with newer models serial (SVC?) on the label? How do you make sure you get the right one?

This one?
https://www.amazon.com/Produplicato...9Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU=
 
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