C2 8KB on SATA Drive Query

[MartinBar]

I have found that if I enable C2 pointers in secure ripping I get hundreds or thousands of errors on each track.

I found that if I enable 8KB the tracks come through clean or with perhaps one error that is soon corrected.

My issue is that this is an internal SATA drive (HL-DT-ST_BDDVDRW_GBC-H20L) and as I understand 8KB is uspposed to be for USB / Firewire drives

Any ideas on why this should be welcome:confused:

[Spoon]

Re: C2 8KB on SATA Drive Query

Did you do the test for C2 pointer detection?

[MartinBar]

Re: C2 8KB on SATA Drive Query

Did you do the test for C2 pointer detection?

Thanks for your quick response

I did not test for C2 pointers (mainly because I do not have a damaged CD to use) however I did check on http://www.daefeatures.co.uk/ where C2 is shown as supported. Perhaps I do need to do a proper test - in any case why would turning on 8KB fix the issue?

[Spoon]

Re: C2 8KB on SATA Drive Query

You need to test to make sure is working correctly on your hardware.

[MartinBar]

Re: C2 8KB on SATA Drive Query

Hi Thanks again for the quick response - I ran C2 detection and it came saying C2 pointers were detected

[bhoar]

Re: C2 8KB on SATA Drive Query

My experience is that some drives that work fine with C2 disabled don't handle passing C2 pointers during audio extraction well at large buffer sizes even if they are directly connected via ATA or SATA. The workaround is to use the 8KB read limit feature.

I have to wonder if the problematic drives' firmware doesn't compensate for the extra room needed to pass the C2 pointers in a hard-coded internal buffer if the read request is large and C2 is enabled. E.g. perhaps the negotiated transaction size is slightly less than 64KB but with C2 enabled, slightly larger than 64KB, but the drive doesn't realize this or doesn't communicate that back to the host. Note: 64KB is a proposed example, I don't know what happens exactly.

Plus, of course, there are some USB or firewire bridge chipsets that also have similar issues with drives than normally do just fine via ATA/SATA.

In any case, I usually just enable it all the time. Doesn't seem to cause any significant performance issues in my testing.

Brendan

[eaglescout1998]

Re: C2 8KB on SATA Drive Query

If I had to guess, with C2 enabled, your drive is producing false positives. I have had HL-DT-ST drives that refused to rip accurately (or even securely) until I turned off C2 error detection.

[MartinBar]

Re: C2 8KB on SATA Drive Query

Hi Thanks for the replies. I would guess that bhoar is right with his explanation. It seems that the drive does not process C2 records correctly unless 8KB is turned on and then it does.

It would make a lot of sense if the description of 8KB made it clear that this was sometimes needed for SATA drives