I've got a 8x DVD USB burner and can't get anything to burn on it. It will start writing and then it will fail the write with an error. Sometimes it will burn the DVD and then the verify pass reports errors. I can see "stripes" where writing obviously did not happen.

This sucks because I'm writing large quantities of photos - a roll of 36 35mm slides in raw format from the Coolscan 9000 is over 8GB - to dual layer DVDs and getting tired of making $1.50 coasters.

This is happening both on my W510 and W520. Is there a problem with the new Corel burning software? I can burn to the device bay USB drive but it is 6x and thus slower, but at least I don't make hockey pucks.

I noticed Corel does not have a verification (read compare) option! That's scary. On the W510 I found and loaded the old Sonic software (which also fails on USB, by the way) but at least I can verify the burn.

Hi. Anyone got any thoughts on this?

Which drive do you have? Some notebook drives don't do dual layer. If you want to try some different software, ImgBurn and CDBurnerXP are bot free and work quite well. I use them myself. Another thing to try is different media.

I've had good results with the free DeepBurner; mostly just burning ISOs to disk though. Nice thing about it is that it's a <4MB exe file with one DLL file you could run from a flash drive

Could be some issue with the USB port though. Do you have another system you could try the drive on?

At first I thought it might be the system, but in fact I see exactly the same results on a W510 and W520.

I was seeing it with an older Sony DVD writer and thought it might be the laser, tossed it and bought a new LG unit and the same problem (on two different systems).

The common thing is that both are running on USB2.0 mode on the NEC (Renesas) USB3.0 ports. It occurred to me last night to try to find a USB port that is on the Intel USB subsystem.

I think the rear USB port on the W520 is on the Intel controller so you should try that.

Are you plugged in to 2 USB ports? Did the drive come with 2 cables or a dual-port cable? Many USB DVD writers are fine with 1 port until you try to write a disk.

To amplify awolfe's comment, it does sound like your problem could be not having enough power for the drive.

I have portable 2.5" HDD enclosures that will require that second cable (or a wall wart) depending on what mechanism I have installed. Without enough power, they get into this cycle of half-spinning-up and then failing to mount. The system sees the drive attaching and detaching. Makes quite a ruckus between the drive itself and the system sounds. If the design of that USB writer keeps the circuitry active despite not having enough power for the laser, it could explain your symptoms.

I usually keep an empty HDD bay in my W520 and have a LiteOn full-height USB DVD recorder plugged into the hub on the mini-dock and of course its own power supply. This setup has been problem-free, but is just about completely different from yours... using the Intel USB 2 controller, dedicated power and Nero. I haven't used Corel's software, but I can say that Nero does have write verification. I use it because it will write to two drives simultaneously which is great when I'm archiving jobs for my clients (we each get a copy).

It sounds like a power issue.

What media are you using? You may be able to slide by at a slower burn rate with poor media that may fail at higher speeds.

Catching up to update but I'll answer a few questions.

The USB writer is self powered (wall wart) so USB power is not being used.

It's really insidious. It's not just on USB but also on the drive bay drives. It's happening with both the W510 and W520. So far I've been using Memorex DVD+R DL 8x. But even the internal drive makes coasters 30% of the time.

Software doesn't seem to make much of a difference. The new Corel software doesn't offer a compare operation, and the Sonic stuff runs on both and has compare but still gets errors.

Right now I'm suspecting that it might really be the Memorex media. I had similar problems though with TDK in the past. But I never had any problems buring on any of the hardware with my T60p and Windows XP. Even the T60 won't burn USB but the common thing on all is WIndows 7. Are there any Thinkpad / Win7 secret settings that might be wrong?

But the other side of the media equation is that Sunday I went to every local store looking for DVD+RDL media and the only kind I could find anywhere was Memorex. If Memorex media had problems everywhere it wouldn't be the dominant store choice. So it comes back to the system again.

By the way, the Wndows ISO burner doesn't finalize the disc. On Dual Layer discs this leaves a portion of the disc only half written, and I can pretty reliably get errors at what I think is the transition.

All of my experiments have been on the USB3 (Renesas/NEC USB3.0 ports.) But then I'm also having problems just on the bay drive writer so now I'm no longer thinking it has anything to do with USB and more of a system setup issue.

Well the major reason it's everywhere is probably that it's cheap, not that it's good. I had so many problems with Memorex-branded media (VHS tape and CD-R discs) in the past that I won't even consider it any more; I wouldn't use it even if it were free.

Memorex is one of the worst.

I suspect they just re-brand whatever OEM media they can get cheapest that week.

So I got some media from other vendors (Kodak, TDK, and someone else) and I think this is a system drive or Win7 problem. I have two machines (W510 and W520) that have different bay DVD drives (one is Panasonic, the other Lite-On(?)), and a USB drive that uses a different drive in the same Lite-On family. None of them in any combination can produce a reliable burn... In all cases the failure is either:
1. Write fails (40%)
2. Compare errors (40%)
3. Subsequent errors just reading the files back in explorer (20%).

Failures are still >50%.

This is for dual-layer 8x DVDs (8.5GB). I seem to not have issues with 4.7G RW discs that represent my staging discs. I don't write many write once 4.7G discs.

I'm going to call Lenovo tonight as the Media "play" was not successful, although it is true that the Memorex media failure rate was about 80%.

Are you maxing out the CPU utilization on your system? Do you have any other programs that are demanding CPU or harddrive IO?

Nope. Nothing else is running during the process. Read buffer set to max.