Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
can cause read errors or severe performance loss. Many manufacturers seal off the lens and internal
components from the drive bay in airtight enclosures. Other drives, although not sealed, have double
dust doors—one external and one internal—to keep dust from the inside of the drive. All these
features help prolong the life of your drive.
Some drives are sealed, which means no air flows through the chamber in which the laser and lens
reside. Always look for sealed drives in harsh industrial or commercial environments. In a standard
office or home environment, it is probably not worth the extra expense.
To determine whether a particular drive is sealed, you may need to view FAQ or support questions
considering drive cleaning; this information may not always be listed on the drives' spec sheet.
If the laser lens gets dirty, so does your data. The drive will spend a great deal of time seeking and
reseeking or will finally give up. Lens-cleaning discs are available, but built-in cleaning mechanisms
are now included on virtually all good-quality drives. This might be a feature you'll want to consider,
particularly if you work in a less-than-pristine work environment or have trouble keeping your desk
clean, let alone your drive laser lens. You can clean the lens manually, but it is generally a delicate
operation requiring that you partially disassemble the drive. Also, damaging the lens mechanism by
using too much force is pretty easy to do. Because of the risks involved, in most cases I do not
recommend the average person disassemble and try to manually clean the laser lens.
Note
Before using a cleaning disc, check the drive vendor's recommendations to determine whether
this method of maintenance is recommended. Some vendors do not recommend the use of
cleaning discs because the felt pads or brushes used can scratch the laser lens.
How to Reliably Record Optical Discs
Six major factors influence your ability to create a working disc: interface type, drive buffer size, the
location and condition of the data you want to record, the recording speed, whether the computer is
performing other tasks while trying to create the disc, and the features available in your recording
software. If you are having problems, there are some things you can check. The simplest thing you can
do to ensure trouble-free recording is to make sure the drive has some form of buffer underrun
protection. The data buffer in the drive holds information read from the original data source, so that if
a pause in data reading occurs, there's less of a possibility of a buffer underrun until the on-drive
buffer runs empty. Current drives with buffer underrun protection virtually eliminate this problem, no
matter what size buffer is in the drive. Some mastering programs might offer an option to disable
buffer underrun protection. However, you should leave it enabled at all times unless you are using an
old drive that does not support this feature.
Tip
If you have problems with reliable disc creation at the drive's maximum speed, try using a
lower speed. Your mastering job will take twice as long, but it's better to create a working
disc more slowly than ruin a blank more quickly.
Buffer Underruns and Buffer Underrun Protection
