Pioneer 103/A03 and 104/A04 drives suffer from UDMA bug

DrByte used our newssubmit to tell us that Pioneer drives are currently suffering a bug that might affect also some of our visitors. The bug is in the A03/103 and the A04/104 DVD records.

If you have had a 'communication error' with this drive you should read on:

There is a major bug in ALL the Pioneer DVD-R writers (A03/103 & A04/104). For 2 months now I own a 104 DVD writer from Pioneer, and in the beginning I wasted many DVD-R because of a 'communication error'.

After searching and searching I found out that the Pioneer DVD writers can't handle UDMA under Windows XP & 2000 ! If I put my drive in PIO4 in the BIOS and in XP (also applies for Windows 2000) the drive works fine. Except that the buffer is fluctuating a lot between 20% and 97%.

When it comes to 20% the bufferunderrun protection kicks in, fills the buffer en the proces repeats it self.

Even with the latest firmware for the A04 & 104 (Version 1.20) this problem is not solved. You can read about it here. As you can see it's from Pioneer Australia, and the problem is known, but nothing has been done to correct it !

Source: Pioneer Australia