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Hi,

I've been out of the loop for a good while so I'm a fish out of water on this but I wanted to run a question across those of you here that are diehards and will know if this is possible or not.

A couple of years ago, I ran across a great deal on a bluray disk duplicator that has 8 LG WH16NS40 drives, mfg in May 2013, Rom Ver 1.00. It was listed for 75 bucks and I quickly grabbed it up and its been in my closet for 2-3 years now. I'm wanting to know if there's a way to flash these to work on a pc and potentially read/write UHD's.

I know its a stretch but if there's a way I know you guys will know the answer here.

Any advice and direction would be greatly appreciated!!
Thanks

englandr753 wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 22, 2026 10:41 pm

Hi,

I've been out of the loop for a good while so I'm a fish out of water on this but I wanted to run a question across those of you here that are diehards and will know if this is possible or not.

A couple of years ago, I ran across a great deal on a bluray disk duplicator that has 8 LG WH16NS40 drives, mfg in May 2013, Rom Ver 1.00. It was listed for 75 bucks and I quickly grabbed it up and its been in my closet for 2-3 years now. I'm wanting to know if there's a way to flash these to work on a pc and potentially read/write UHD's.

I know its a stretch but if there's a way I know you guys will know the answer here.

Any advice and direction would be greatly appreciated!!
Thanks

No. Those drives from 2013 are too old and will have the older, incompatible MT1939 drive platform. They cannot be flashed and will never be able to read UHD discs.

That was my guess but wanted to confirm, thank you. These drives appear to have barely been used. Is it possible to flash these drives to work normally on a pc and read/write standard bluray and dvd disks normally? It sure seems to be a waste of drives to sit in a duplicator that no one uses anymore.

englandr753 wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 22, 2026 10:55 pm

That was my guess but wanted to confirm, thank you. These drives appear to have barely been used. Is it possible to flash these drives to work normally on a pc and read/write standard bluray and dvd disks normally? It sure seems to be a waste of drives to sit in a duplicator that no one uses anymore.

You don't need to flash them and should not as Marty said.

But they should work out of the box on PC for regular Blu-ray and dvd

Oddly, I've tried two of these drives on two different machines and had trouble with both seeing and accessing the drives. I could open the drive door but the drive wouldn't read any disks and the normal icon you see when a cd or dvd rom drive is connected was missing. I'm currently redoing one of these systems and will try it again and post back if no luck. The motherboard was the same in both systems so maybe its a related issue.

Thanks for all of the helpful responses here. I will definitely be an active member once I finish setting up my office and get the old systems back online.

englandr753 wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 24, 2026 5:15 pm

Oddly, I've tried two of these drives on two different machines and had trouble with both seeing and accessing the drives. I could open the drive door but the drive wouldn't read any disks and the normal icon you see when a cd or dvd rom drive is connected was missing. I'm currently redoing one of these systems and will try it again and post back if no luck. The motherboard was the same in both systems so maybe its a related issue.

Thanks for all of the helpful responses here. I will definitely be an active member once I finish setting up my office and get the old systems back online.

How was it hooked up what USB adapters if any
Was it one of the recommended one from the guide?

englandr753 wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 22, 2026 10:55 pm

It sure seems to be a waste of drives to sit in a duplicator...

TLDR; keep it if you ever desire a command and control auto-loader.

If it is like I'm imagining then these are nice because you can gut them and put a N150 or RPI or whatever inside and have 1/2 of a command and control loader. Sadly, the other half is the armature, which is some aluminum extrusions, some 3-D printed parts, some C/++ code and several other things at a minimum... so you can say the most important 1/2 of a loader is still missing .

However, happily, the type of tower you have is great if you every get the armature. To replace what you have, you can buy 2 four or five drive bay cages and connect them, but then you still have to add everything else since the cages aren't sturdy. The more firmly you can bolt down the drives the less resonance and vibration you will have, but with free standing drive cages it's bad. Ultimately, if you chose the drive cages, you'd wind up with exactly what you already have now after you've applied all the hardware to make it sturdy.

Depending on the model, it may also possible to turn it into a auto-loader right now, but that requires at least knowing or learning C/C++. Luckily, the code to get this running is extremely basic and could be considered a C tutorial in it's own right.

FWIW, I have 2 of those drives and they're MUCH better for ripping CDs than my Pioneer 212v's which are for ripping UHD Blu-rays. The Pioneers are kind of crap for CD as they seemingly always report garbage :-/ (AccuratreRip always fails as no 2 hashes are ever the same).