ASUS BW-16D1HT - Experience

[IronMan2]

Just wanted to share some thoughts on this drive and experience so far in case anyone else wants to take the plunge on it.

UK buyer - came from E-Buyer at £56ish.
Plugged into a SATA port direct (with AHCI enabled).
Drive came with 3.10 firmware (not sure if that's 3.10a or not) and a manufacture date of August 2019.

Flashed to 3.10-MK, using firmware flasing instructions:-

https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic ... 16&t=18933
and
https://www.mediafire.com/file/j2zetp5w ... k.zip/file

Windows 10 downloaded a .net update on first launch of the tool which it needed to run.
Note: You should right-click on the firmware tool and choose Run as Administrator, otherwise you will get an odd error about not being able to access the drive. The instructions don't appear to mention that or it could be a specific Windows 10 issue.

I just picked the 3.10-MK file then the drive flashed fine, didn't go down to 3.02 (yet...)
Installed MakeMKV into Windows 10.

Make MKV did report that drive had "Unrestricted read speed: possible but not yet enabled".
Not sure if the author of MakeMKV has fixed that already, but it's currently ripping my blu-ray of IronMan2 at 8.0X (climbed up to that so far)
Riplock doesn't appear to be an issue on this particular drive or firmware (or the author has updated MakeMKV for it)

I don't have any UHD discs to rip so can't say if that side is working or not. I might grab a cheapo one to try it out and report back, but for now it's staying put on 3.10-MK until I get the rest of them ripped and before I do something dumb and brick it...

[IronMan2]

Had a slight oddity in trying to rip my Hurt Locker blu-ray tonight. The drive spun up but gave up trying to read it after a few minutes. Put it in my old Asus portable drive and it's had no issue with it - read it just fine and is currently ripping it.

I had a similar issue with another movie, but other way around - the older drive spat out the disc and said it had read errors, but ripped just fine in the new one.

Ce la vie.

[IronMan2]

And Hurt Locker bombed out...

Annoying as it was ripping just fine, got to about 90% and then I stupidly pushed the drive letter for the blu-ray drive when I was trying to set up a Handbrake encode, which caused a clash between it and MakeMKV which was in process of ripping it quite happily.

Not sure what can make a disc go bad in the time it takes to eject the tray and put it back in again! Windows wouldn't even recognise a disc in the drive - tried it in my standalone blu-ray player (a not inexpensive Panasonic) and it refused to have anything to do with it, so definitely looks like a bad disc.

[Woodstock]

Most suspicious of a Windows conflict than a bad disk. What happens if you restart Windows (preferably with powering the machine down) and try again?

[jonghotti]

It's been my experience that the ASUS BW-16D1HT is the greatest drive ever, or at least the best drive for use with MakeMKV currently on the market. Thank you.

[Merlyn6175]

Sometimes the ASUS BW-16D1HT throws up errors like checksum mismatch or loads of illegal SCSI errors. and it's never the discs. I find powering the drive down for 30 seconds (My case is always open)by removing the power and SATA cable or a full power down removing 110v/230v plug.

Then repower and just by magic MakeMKV rips the same disc you never took out of the drive with no errors.