90312 - I share that view, that it is not just disks with physical issues that cause the CRC checks on DVD drives, and then the ridiculous '6 and you are out' historical imposition by Microsoft kicks in. It should always have been readily tweakable by the end user - I can trace my PC use back to being a beta tester for the original IBM PC, and in my experience, even the very earliest hard drives were never unreliable enough to warrant a permanent, unseen to most end users, switch to a mode that can severely impact performance, and cause other knock on problems. On the contrary, the full height drives back then were in fact over engineered, which more than compensated for them lacking later technological refinements.
We all see spelling mistakes on DVD media labels, I suspect that some of these oversights may involve less than optimum copy protection strategies. There have been some prominent cases of where things have gone badly wrong in this area. Mispressings can happen as well - the Jim Capaldi memorial concert DVD is a classic example. I went to the concert, and received the DVD the same day. It stuck for a few seconds on one of the Joe Walsh tracks, and then stuttered over the next 15 seconds. Internet postings revealed others had exactly the same problems - a quick examination showed that there was an issue with the way the pits had been pressed. The DVD was withdrawn, and replaced - the company involved sent my copy directly to me. When a drive encounters these less usual conditions, and tries to copy, probably with retries becoming involved, then CRC issues can potentially start clocking up - things are literally not adding up any more.
I look after the DVD's we use, and invariably back them up when they are new, right out of the case. (What happens to them after that, when the family gets hold of them can of course a variable, but the disks and players are in good condition). Point is, I do not copy disks that are damaged, but over time, the drives do slip back into PIO mode.
If we also factor in the issues that others are seeing within the actual Backup process - sometimes the copy fails in literally one second, (see the logs I have posted), sometimes is takes a few minutes. When the process appears not to know the copy protection mechanism for a given disk, strange things appear to happen, that can permeate through to the hardware level. Those who have looked at a disk diagnostic trace from midrange or mainframes will be well aware of the potential for such interactivity, on PC client or servers, the tendency is that the hardware is relatively cheap, and/or of smaller scale, and hence not worth analysing, so it is just replaced.
I have only seen of those issues personally within the last 12 months. What I do find surprising is that the people that use DVDFAB far more than I do are not getting some of the outright failures to split or clone, there are other some reports appearing, maybe I was very unlucky with getting 6 out of 6 failures to split. Are people then reverting to Movie Only and being content with that? If you could get 100% quality every time, and had the ability to span more than one disk, I could see that being a popular option for many, in any event.
Amanda
