Dealing with poor ASUS BW-16D1HT quality control

[kevmitch]

I understand that the whole family of UHD friendly desktop drives have terrible quality control and new drives are often unreliable or unusable out of the box. My question is what exactly are the failure modes and how do I quickly determine if the one I just received from amazon.ca is one of these unfortunate drives so I can send it back before the return window expires. What percentage of drives are expected to be bad? Are even "good" drives known to have persistent issues?

I previously had a BW-16D1HT for around two years. On some rips, it would read a regular blu ray with no issues. However, on subsequent rips of of the same disc, it might hit read errors. Even when it didn't hit errors, it would sometimes make horrible grinding seek noises and take a long time to actually complete the rip. The seek noises sound kind of what has been described elsewhere for the sleep bug, but this is not with a UHD disk, and it it starts happening in the middle of a rip, not after sitting idle. These issues persisted even after moving the drive between onboard SATA and a PCIe card sata as well as replacing the cables.

I gave up and recycled the original drive and bought a new BW-16D1HT, as it appears to be one of the few UHD friendly drives currently available (the other being the LG WH16NS40). I have not touched the firmware on the new drive, which is 3.10. Unfortunately, after several successful test rips of the same non-UHD disc with the factory firmware, it has started exhibiting similar issues that persist across a hard reboot of the whole machine. I have attached a log. During the bad rip, in dmesg I see a lot of

Code: Select all

[ 6632.297893] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr1] tag#12 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE cmd_age=4s                                                      
[ 6632.297897] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr1] tag#12 Sense Key : Medium Error [current]                                                                                     
[ 6632.297899] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr1] tag#12 Add. Sense: L-EC uncorrectable error                                                                                   
[ 6632.297901] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr1] tag#12 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 94 ec bf 00 00 03 00      
[ 6632.297903] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sr1, sector 39039740 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 0

It's looking like this is indeed a bad drive. Now I guess I have to decide to whether send it back for a refund or for a replacement. What are the chances a replacement BW-16D1HT will be any better? Is it possible I might be better off with an LG WH16NS40, which is actually cheaper? Maybe I should hold out in hopes that WH16NS60 will reappear for sale as I have a hypothesis that although this should be the same underlying hardware, there might be binning going on that reserves the more reliable specimens for the "higher end" models. Finally, I could just get a Pioneer BDR-212UBK in the hopes that makemkv UHD support will be added in the future. I am reluctant to get one of the slim drives as my experience with those is that they are rather slow.

[kevmitch]

I just realized that it doesn't look like my debug log actually got attached to my above post for whatever reason. I will try again with another log exhibiting the problem with the current new drive. This log is after flashing the ASUS-BW-16D1HT-3.10-WM01601-211901041014.bin firmware, which doesn't seem to have improved things.

This log is generated from using makemkvcon to rip an individual title. It seems to get hung up on the title scanning. It seeks around a bunch and starts cycling up to what sounds like maximum speed and then back down again. Eventually, it spits out

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DEBUG: Code 100941314 at Eo,z@~(-9ICj~]#WH6:29395195
DEBUG: Code 100941314 at Eo,z@~(-9ICj~]#WH6:29393792
Error 'Scsi error - HARDWARE ERROR:TIMEOUT ON LOGICAL UNIT' occurred while reading '/BDMV/STREAM/00008.m2ts' at offset '3993600'

After ejecting and reloading the disc, it is able to rip the same title without issue. It's possible my earlier experiences persisting across power cycle were either bad disc or just bad luck running into the intermittent issue again.

It would be really nice to know if this drive is just known to be sketchy since I've had two that seem to have similar problems, or if I've just had bad luck getting two bad ones. Could it be that I'm just hitting this issue more since I am ripping titles one by one and therefore rereading the disc contents repeatedly. Most people would only do this once per disc and would likely cancel the GUI and retry if it took this long to load the title list.

[jonghotti]

Yes good drives have persistent issues and you've mentioned them. Let's stop with the all desktop drives are bad narrative and move on. A really good idea is to NOT buy drives off Amazon, a company known for shipping used and refurbished drives as new, and instead using one of the drive sellers here who've already gone to the trouble of vetting the hardware so you know you're buying a solid working drive. People persist in sticking with the lowest price you're going to get the lowest quality.

[kevmitch]

Yes good drives have persistent issues and you've mentioned them. Let's stop with the all desktop drives are bad narrative and move on. A really good idea is to NOT buy drives off Amazon, a company known for shipping used and refurbished drives as new, and instead using one of the drive sellers here who've already gone to the trouble of vetting the hardware so you know you're buying a solid working drive. People persist in sticking with the lowest price you're going to get the lowest quality.

Could you clarify a bit more. You're saying replacing the drive won't fix these issues? Are you saying desktop drives are bad and it's not worth talking about, or that they aren't and it's overblown? Furthermore, are you suggesting that by buying from one of the resellers, that this wouldn't be happening. If there are are "persistent issues" with good drives, that would suggest otherwise. In any case, the reason I didn't buy from a reseller is that I am willing and able to upgrade the firmware myself and send the drive back if it's bad. I just need to know what "bad" is.

[asmcom]

Amazon does not test the ASUS BW-16D1HT drives before dispatch.

If you buy from a reseller the drive will have been tested with at least 4 discs.

1 x BD50
2 x BD66
1 X BD100

In general the ASUS is a very good drive. The problem with Amazon is people send back faulty drives and then Amazon send the drives out again to different customers with out properly testing the returns.

I personally now test all my drives with 4 x 4k UHD discs.

I have had 2 x ASUS BW-16D1HT faulty desktop drives out of over 300 ASUS Drives in the last 12 months. I caught these drives during testing.

I have never had a faulty unit back from a customer.

Asmcom

[kevmitch]

The WH16NS60 are available again, so I bought one and flashed the HL-DT-ST-BD-RE_WH16NS60-1.02-NM00100-211810291936 firmware to it with makemkvcon. I can confirm that it demonstrates the same intermittent "HARDWARE ERROR:TIMEOUT ON LOGICAL UNIT" issues I have described with the two BW-16D1HT. I have however realized that it only happens when using libredrive. On adding an sdf_Stop entry to my settings.conf, the drive has had no problems so far. Now I feel bad about recycling the first BW-16D1HT out of frustration.

It sounds like the issue likely is the sleep bug, which is actually a speed bug as described by mikeadmin https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic ... =30#p90054. I will do some experimentation with libredrive drive speed control (https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22689), otherwise I may have to choose between reliability and UHD capability with libredrive for the time being.

To answer my questions, based on the three drives I've seen, this behaviour is normal and the "quality control" issues with the drives themselves are overblown. The more common issues appear to be the result of running the libredrive firmware. Buying from a reseller is not going to solve that.

[Billycar11]

It sounds like the issue likely is the sleep bug, which is actually a speed bug as described by mikeadmin https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic ... =30#p90054.

To answer my questions, based on the three drives I've seen, this behaviour is normal and the "quality control" issues with the drives themselves are overblown. The more common issues appear to be the result of running the libredrive firmware. Buying from a reseller is not going to solve that.

It's not the sleep bug the WH16NS60 does not have that

It's not overblown 99% of my BU40N's don't get read errors were as only 75% of the desktop lg and asus don't this is actual data from 600+ drives I have tested.

Libredrive is not the problem the drive is. libre drive only removes bus encryption and optionally speed control.

Also if you sdf stop you can no longer rip UHD discs and really thats the entire pont of these drives.

Again libredrive is not the problem the drives are we can't get pioneer drive support soon enough assuming they are good