[Paranoia] No such device or address errors

[Jonathan Morace]

> On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 11:42:38AM -0800, Jonathan Morace wrote:
> > This leads me to believe there might be something in the core linux
> > SCSI code, a fundamental problem with older Plextor CDROM drives, or
> > something cdparanoia is doing that is somehow triggering this.

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 00:54:15 -0500, Monty <xiphmont at xiph.org> wrote:
> Starting in late 1998-ish, Plextor drives went over the top trying to
> put paranoia-like capability into the drive firmware such that if they
> hit a media error, they would retry endlessly and as far as the
> computer was concerned, the drive had disappeared.  There was no way
> to interrupt the drive or abort it; it would not reappear after a bus
> reset because it was still occupied trying to get that damned sector.
> They would sometimes do this even on brand new commercial disks that
> had manufacturing defects that wouldn't make other drives even hiccup.
> 
> The behavior appeared in a specific firmware update (1.03 maybe?); in
> addition, it was a firmware update that couldn't be backed out by
> reverting to an earlier revision, and at that point I abandoned
> buying/recommending Plextor.  I don't know if they ever fixed the
> problem.

Wow, thats exactly the information I needed.  This seems consistent
with what I'm seeing.  I've got a bunch of these drives and I started
individually testing them with a very scratched up disc.  Drives
manufactured on certain dates seem to fail surprisingly consistently
while drives manufactured on other dates work fine.  As far as I can
tell it has more to do with the date printed on it than the
TLA/firmware version.  If anyone is curious, I can send what I find to
the list.

What brands/drives do you recommend for DAE?  From what I've read, I
thought plextor had the best reputation in terms of audio ripping
speed.

Thanks for the help,

Jonathan