Recurring Issue With Multiple Pioneer Drives

[Jimmy_Tightlips]

You should use the Microsoft drivers, not the AMD drivers. I don't know how you misunderstood that.....

I didn't misunderstand, I was saying that my PC is using the Microsoft drivers already.

[Coopervid]

Then switch to AMD to try.

[dcoke22]

You might be better served by taking the drives out of the computer, putting them into an external enclosure and connecting them via USB. Billycar11 suggested as much last Monday.

[Coopervid]

You might be better served by taking the drives out of the computer, putting them into an external enclosure and connecting them via USB. Billycar11 suggested as much last Monday.

Here is a really cheap solution but works also for SATA SSD w/o the power supply. For optical drives you need to connect the included power supply. In addition you can also use it to flash optical drives like the LG / ASUS. I have one and have tested it.

https://www.amazon.com/BENFEI-Drive-Ada ... r=8-3&th=1

[Jimmy_Tightlips]

You might be better served by taking the drives out of the computer, putting them into an external enclosure and connecting them via USB. Billycar11 suggested as much last Monday.

Here is a really cheap solution but works also for SATA SSD w/o the power supply. For optical drives you need to connect the included power supply. In addition you can also use it to flash optical drives like the LG / ASUS. I have one and have tested it.

https://www.amazon.com/BENFEI-Drive-Ada ... r=8-3&th=1

Thanks both, I've considered it, and agree it's the easiest and most sensible solution. That said, I just much prefer having the drive internally if possible (I even went out my way to find a modern PC case with 5.25 bays purely for this purpose).

I already tried a Sabrent 3.5 HDD Adapter I have - the drive powered up but wasn't detected in Windows. But, if you can vouch for the one you linked I'll give it a try.

What I'm thinking is the following:
- Get a Male to Female Sata Data Cable
- Connect the drive to that adapter using the cable
- Power the drive using the SATA Power from my PSU
- Keep the adapter inside the case
- Get a USB 3.0 to USB A splitter (e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/ChenYang-ports ... r=8-3&th=1)
- Connect the adapter into the splitter

It's a little silly, but hopefully it works.

[dcoke22]

If the experiment with the USB adapter ends up proving that the SATA ports on your motherboard are the culprit behind the data corruption, then I think you'll have made useful forward progress.

I presume one could find a PCIe expansion card with a couple of SATA ports on it that you could then use to provide an internal SATA connection to your optical drives.

[dcoke22]

I don't know if this ASM1164 controller is any good, but something along these lines:

https://www.startech.com/en-us/cards-ad ... -sata-card

[Jimmy_Tightlips]

Ok, I can finally share a solid update regarding this:

I got access to my old PC again and I took both the S09 and S13 with me to test.

Sure enough, as I think we all expected, both worked perfectly. I repeated all the same tests I'd performed at home and they were able to read CD's with no issue whatsoever, playback was perfect, EAC rips were verified as accurate and I was able to verify my burned PS1 game without having multiple thousand miscompares every few seconds.

Following on from that, I brought my old LG Drive back with me (GGW-H20L - really nice drive for its age) and gave it a try in my PC:

At first it seemed much better, initial impressions of CD Playback were positive. There were no immediately obvious issues (crackles, skips etc.) and it sounded decent, though I only tried it with some crappy £5 earbuds I had laying about so my better audio equipment may have revealed some faults.

When I attempted to extract the CD using EAC...the same issue as with the Pioneer's arose. The rips couldn't be verified as accurate and had noticable issues. Attempting to verify my PS1 game also had the same behaviour - thousands of miscompares every few seconds.

This has left me to conclude that my PC just really doesn't like Blu-Ray drives - seemingly irrespective of brand or age. I'm leaning towards accusing the SATA Controller but I lack the knowledge and resources to be able to make a concrete judgment on this; it may even just be that my specific, individual, Motherboard is defective and there's no inherent fault to this model.

The good news is that the idea I suggested above has actually worked, in fact its worked shockingly well.

It took a bit of hacking together (I had to break the teeth off of the SATA cable and the adapter itself in order to get them connected) and is partially held in place by electrical tape, but that aside it works wonderfully and allows me to complete all my tests perfectly without any issues at all.

In fact as it's all hidden away in my case, routed around back and under the PSU shroud, you can't even tell there's anything out of the ordinary going on - it looks just as clean and tidy as if I'd plugged it in using SATA.

I'm happy with the end results, whilst I'd obviously have preferred it to have just worked out of the box using SATA I'm glad I've at least been able to find a solution whilst being able to keep the drive inside my PC.

Thanks Coopervid for the Adapter suggestion - it's excellent and even works with the Pioneer BD Drive Utility; I was worried about finding a cost-effective USB 3.0 adapter which would actually work with ODD's, so your recommendation here has helped me a lot.

dcoke22 - A PCIe SATA Card was also a good suggestion, though part of the reason I went for the weird USB approach was in the interest of aesthetics and functionality. I didn't want the look of my build compromised by a somewhat ungainly PCIe card, and also didn't want anything obstructing airflow for my (already very hot) GPU. What would be interesting to investigate though would be to see if any PCIe cards exist that use the same SATA Controller as my Motherboard (I've no clue what it is though) and whether they exhibit the same behaviour. If I hadn't already spent way too much money on this, I'd be interested to investigate as it could be a way to further narrow down the cause of this issue.

Thanks everyone for all the help you've given me, I greatly appreciate it. Its been an interesting few weeks, and if nothing else I've learned a fair bit and it gave me an excuse to buy an S13J-X (even though it turns out I didn't actually need it after all). Hopefully documenting this experience can help someone else in the future

[Coopervid]

Now that's a hack! Glad my proposal for the adapater helped.

Your response reinforced my opinion regarding AMD chips and chip sets. I once had an AMD Athlon PC and it worked perfectly with standard office software etc. But as soon as I added non-standard hardware as a TV card and a video recording card hell broke loose. An SCSI adapter for a DAT backup tape drive made it even worse. Then I swore never to use an AMD based system anymore. Simple SATA port issues are something that I never heard of for operating an optical drive and there might be ways to correct them. Yes, I heard of issues with flashing drives but not operating them.

Anyway- thanks for your feedback. It might help others who run in such issues.