[Paranoia] No such device or address errors

[Bill Davidsen]

Jonathan Morace wrote:
>>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.

You might consider making a reasonable number of tests showing results 
with various manufacturing date and firmware, and perhaps results with 
latest firmware if an upgrade is available.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   CTO TMR Associates, Inc
   Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979