mercury_in_flames

ah i see, doesnt mac have some sort of thing for defragging?? Mine is NTFS as its on a windows comp :lol:i get the best of both worlds, usb, both firewire types on the disk drive, defragging.

LOL no way man!! It's dead easy to put a new USB2 card into a desktop. You can get 4 port USB2 cards, and firewire 400/800 cards. Those are alot cheaper than buying adapters etc for a laptop. My laptop only has 2 usb2 ports, a PCMCIA slot and a firewire port. :/ Oh and those USB hubs where it splits the power of 1 usb port into 4 or more ports are stupid, they cant power a device to save themselves, well except for a mouse and a card reader and tiny things.

I think sound upgrades on laptops are a waste of time imho. At least with other peripherals its normally just the power cable and USB cable and thats it. With surround sound theres even MORE cables LOL Nooooo..

I;ve had mine since 31/7/2005 When I make images of dvd's to burn I always get big fragmented chunks, but i dont think this is unnatural. I always defrag my drive as soon as it gets a bit fragmented. Even if its two 4.7 gig fragments I do it. I asked lacie support and they said fragmenting the drive often shouldnt cause any problems. Even those fragments make a difference when it comes to the read speed and me writing to dvd's from the external.

lol of course you can man, you can upgrade your dvd writer to the NEX drive the others have couldnt you? I am using a laptop and this is what I use: It's meant to be able to write at 4x on dual layer media but I always get crappy writes when i write at 4x so I stick to 2.4x. I think there's something wrong with my particular external drive though just because it wont write at 16x on ANY media i throw at it. Am planning to send it back to get checked for problems soon, still under warranty. I just plug the drive into a usb2 port and it works a charm. I prefer using this to my cd-rw/dvd rom drive in the lap top just because the external has smaller seek/access times, and is generally faster when it comes to reading discs.

I've been ok pretty much. I cant say it enough, don;t put all your eggs into one basket, dont get a huge hard external hard disk, get a few small ones and backup the same files onto both of them. Or at least make backups of what is on the external hard disk to blank dvd;s. I keep all my omg files, mp3's, photos, and videos on my external but I keep a backup of the photos, my documents folder, and all my 'little' programs/drivers etc on one dvd and my mp3's on a dual layer disc. sorry to hear about ur bad luck man.

I suppose you could use re writeables but the quality if the writes to those discs isnt that good. Problem with himd = slow transer rates. :/

you could always get a dvd burner and buy a 100 pack of decent blank dvd's. A hundred pack of Taiyo Yuden, a very good brand, will set you back about 35 pounds or 70 US dollars. Thats about 400 gigs worth of space. Obviously the downside is that once you've burnt the disc you cant erase it. I have a 160 gig lacie and its been perfect. I think the problem is with the bigger versions. I havent heard many problems about people with the one ive got, its been more of a problem with the ones that are the next sizes up. If you've got the money for a 1T lacie then Im sure you can afford dual layer dvd's or even dvd-ram. Those are double the capacity of standard dvd's. They cost around 100 dollars for a pack of 25. A dual layer can be fully written in about 17 minutes with a current writer.

lol you cant compare the two. A dvd writer writes something like seven times the amount of data on a cd-r. A dvd+r can be written in about six minutes. Pretty sweet, they have those at spv.co.uk. My lap top only has a cd writer and a dvd rom, hence the reason i use an external dvd writer. I wonder what writing a dual layer dvd when using only the battery?

false ghosts with everything but DL i;d strongly reccomend people to stay away from the 'tuff disc' brand.

If you don't have the biggest cache, it's ok as long as you have a large amount of ram, and some sort of buffer-underun protection thing. From what I've read, it doesnt matter if you have a 2mb or 8mb cache. It's what you do when you are burning that counts and the media. If you are using programs like sonic stage, wmp, the internet, downloading, etc, you are very likely to get coasters. I was burning with some really cheap dvd media when I first got my sony writer and out of 10 dual layer dvd's I would get about 3 coasters. Now i use better media and leave the computer to write. Not one coaster since.

Just edited the title topic to reduce the speed of the thread becoming redundent. So what dvd writers do you have in your computer?

I was just wondering what your opinions are on buying Retail or OEM. I want to get another dvd writer for my desktop and am not sure whether to go OEM or Retail. I've heard that there's a higher chance of getting faults from an OEM drive than a Retail one. Any help would be greatly appreciated. -GTR

I dont know, i can say that with md the sound might be a bit fuller, but only if im listening really hard. I think the whole atrac 256 on hd5 sounds like crap next to SP on md is bull. scuse. I also aggree with lamewing ^^, ive had my r909 give me plenty of 'no disc' errors in its time. At least with the hd5 if its broken its broken. there arent loads of different issues that can cause faulty behavior. Unlike, dirty lense, magnetic block recording head busted, battery door going bust. There are flaws for both i guess. The only thing flaw i have with the hd5 is that it isnt as quick to start up as md. again, im looking at both as playback devices, ignoring the fact that md records. oh and I aggree with sparky here, this thread is a bit of a waste of time. The answer is simple, choose an hdd device if you want all your music no matter what sound quality you think is 'the best'. choose md, if you want to be able to record, if you think it sounds better etc. Also if you dont know what to get, get a second hand md first. Then get an hdd after and see how you feel.

haha the remote, thats always a give-away, like the white ipod 'phones. If it was me and it was an old minidisc of mine that I didnt care too much about, I would look at the guy, then my minidisc, then the guy. Take out my pocket. Put it on the ground, AND STAMP ON IT!! HA TAKE THAT YOU STUPID THIEF! lol that would be great, he would just be thinking errr wtf?? LOL

Haha, you better pray it's not a piece of poo man I ordered an Epson R340. I am sort of regretting it as the cost of inks is quite high and I wanted a printer that could print black and white photos properly. I know this wont do that now because it only has one black ink tank, not different shades of gray and a black like in hp printers. I bought this printer because of the 6 ink tanks, ie replace one each time one goes instead of the whole colour when only one of the colours in the tank is gone, and also for the features, i.e pictbridge, colour screen, can print onto printable cd's. I am thinking of returning it. What do you reckon??? I mean I want something that prints on cd's and none of the hp's do that, the only printer I know that does this are epsons and canons. The canon ip8500, which happens to be 70 pounds more expensive than the r340.

I dont get any of that hiss thing on my hd5, as culp said, its what 'phones you use. I have sony ex81's and they are fine for my portable listening needs. MD and mp3 are two completely different things. The one thing mp3 has over md is that you can have ALL of your music on one device. The hd5 has sound that is easily on par with net md. (i have a mz-n910 and an r909 also). I never use my md for portable listening just because its more bulk and the hassle of carrying discs. If you are a commuter and only need one disc a day then ok, but if you want all your music, or a huge amount of it, watever, get the mp3. The reason why i didnt get himd was because I never record and I have heard a fair bit about disc errors with 1 gig discs, and a bit about mp3's sounding pooish when played back on a himd portable. Just my two cents. On that other note also, I have had my hd5 for almost a year now, i even got a dent in the back made it freeze twice by riding my bike with it in my pocket etc, and its still fine. Honestly how long do you want it to last anyway? We get tired of the things we buy these days long before two years is up. Also the hd5 has a removable battery, which happens to be roughly the same size as a blank minidisc, albeit as heavy as 3 discs or something. I charge my hd5 once every 2 to 4 weeks.

i said i wouldnt buy a 'pro' deck. If it stated regular himd deck, like the jb980 sort of thing, for home use then yeah I'd get one. I just assumed pro meant for musicians/studios/dj's etc.

damn that sucks. I hope i never go through anything like that. Was he in a dodgy area?

can someone just give me the actual link of the video clip, i cant understand what u mean by bottom of the lat picture of the first page. -greg

I already have the 40elk, I am just saying that I would want to be able to use the scroll wheel and the whole kit and kaboodle on the 40elk with the rh1. If it really is 100% functional then I might have to consider this thing. Hmmmmm

What a waste of time making the RM-MC40ELK, if it;s only for use on pre HD5 sony audio devices. They should have made the 40elk the remote of choice for this thing.

thats some tiny pic, get some larger pics up here along with a price ey?? Not interested myself, just a pointer.

Have a good one Nismo.

Finally got round to start watching my Godfather trilodgy. Watched the first one today. Hopefully will get to watch the second tomorow.