F13 Blue Ray Drive Puzzle ! Please Help !!!

NOTE: PROBLEM RESOLVED WITH DIFFERENT SOFTWARE TESTS. Read below.

I bought F13 USA model with BD burner drive advertised as 6x bD burner capable.
I have been using it and found out that ripping data speed displayed on my DVD Fab software is 8.58MBps. Its always like this, weather i rip Blueray disk of 25 or 50 GB. Fine.. a bit slow.

so I happened to see this on Wikipedia: Blu-ray Disc recordable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

8.58MB/s just happens to match 2x BD drive.

Is sony falsely advertising ??
My drive name is Pioneer BD-RW BD03. supposedly 6x speed. see here:

VPCF13AFX/B | VAIO® F Series Laptop | Sony | Sony Style USA

You can see on this still sold F12 model that speed was lower 2x/4x, so F13v has better, newer optical drive.
VPCF12XHX/B | VAIO® Signature Collection F Series | Sony | Sony Style USA

My F13 Write speed is 1-2x at best sometimes slowing down to x0.2 after 70% of disk burning. It takes couple hours to finish sometimes.
What's the real deal after all ????

any help would be greatly appreciated.

From Wikipedia:

Speed

Drive speed Data rate BD-R write, BD-R DL write
1X[1] 36 Mbit/s 4.5 MB/s 4.29 MiB/s ~95 min. ~190 min.
2X 72 Mbit/s 9 MB/s 8.58 MiB/s ~47 min. ~94 min.
4X 144 Mbit/s 18 MB/s 17.16 MiB/s ~24 min. ~48 min.
6X 216 Mbit/s 27 MB/s 25.75 MiB/s ~16 min. ~32 min.
8X 288 Mbit/s 36 MB/s 34.33 MiB/s ~12 min. ~24 min.
10X 360 Mbit/s 45 MB/s 42.92 MiB/s ~10 min. ~20 min.
12X 432 Mbit/s 54 MB/s 51.50 MiB/s ~8 min. ~16 min.

 

corrected above.

 

Do you mean read or write speed?

It is normal that the speed will start being slow in the beginning and increase until the laser reaches the outside tracks of the disc (read and write), then layer change and the speed decreases again until the inner tracks were reached. If your drive can e.g. read 4x max, you will have something around 2,9 or 3x avg as the read speed.

Writing depends on the used media. If you want to record with maximum speed, you need to use certified media:

1-2x: BD-R 1.1
4x: BD-R 1.2
6x: BD-R 1.3

Make sure your disc supports the desired recording speed. You can check the maximum recording speed in the media descriptors of the disc, e.g. with ImgBurn:

 

Thanks for your reply. I didn't really expect anyone to jump on this thread as i don't see any threads related to BD.

Yes, I was talking about reading when i wrote "ripping" Basically, copying a BD movie with my supposedly 6x BD drive is always 8.58MB/s whicjh is x2 speed. Writing also goes up to x2 only, varying, as you described, from x0.2-x2.

I bought Verbatim x6-25GB and x6-50GB discs.

I am not sure what to do, or who to talk to from sony. I'm afraid anyone from support will not be able to answer this, now believe my numbers.

P.S.
In device manager, I looked up properties of my BD drive ( BD-RW BD03 ), and dthe driver for the drive says its year 2006. How can this be. I'm pretty sure there were no x6 BD burners back then, specially not for laptops.

anyhow.

thanks again for response.

 

I think that you should use another BD-ROM. Some discs are not as readable as others so speed can vary. If you have some unscrambling stuff when reading, check your CPU load. Try reading in ImgBurn - which max. read speed does it show when being in the same screen as the above picture?

The drivers are generic windows drivers. There are no special drivers you would need for the drive, so the 2006 thing makes sense and is no bad thing at all.

As far as I can see, everything is OK on your machine, if there were some issues with your drive, you would not even get 2x speed. I think you have to live with that or you need to buy an external 5 1/4 inch drive and read via USB. The maximum speed then wont exceed 4-5x due to the limitation of USB 2.0.

 

The older UJ240as most often used in the F11 through F13 reads BDrom at 6X. The newer UJ242 used in later F13's only reads at 2X. Both units write at 2X max. So all is kosher.

UJ240as https://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/STORAGE/S277644/en/spec.htm

UJ242 https://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/STORAGE/P241657/en/spec.htm

 

Thanks a lot for all the input. I did download ImgBurn, and tested creating ISO (reading BD) of copy of movie i did couple of weeks ago from original.
I'm very happy that it performed as rated !! It averaged about 5x data transfer of over 23MB/s !! It even reached 6x for a moment or two!! Here is image.

Next I will test burning of this ISO and will post results. My hopes are up again. My guess now is that it could be DVD Fab software that is not using full capability of my Blueray drive.

 

I'm not sure i understand. Sony F13 laptops do not have Panasonic Blueray Drives. They have Pioneer model BDR-TD03 1.00 (ATAPI)

Speciffications (from Sony web page) are:

Optical Drive
BD-R DL Read / Write : 6x max
BD-R Read / Write : 6x max
BD-RE DL Read / Write : 6x max
BD-RE Read / Write : 6x max
Blu-ray Disc™ Support : Read / Write (BD-R/-RE/-ROM)19
CD Support : Read / Write (CD/-R/-RW)
DVD Support : Read / Write (DVD±R/±RW/±R DL/-RAM)

 

Success, again with ImgBurn.
I just burned ISO i created in post #7 above. Max write speed went as hiugh as x5.7 at times !! It did have some Buffer fill/empty issues where writing would pause for few seconds, but still the whole operation was done in under 30 minutes. See attached pic.

thanks again. I

Now that i know my BD can perform as advertised, next thing to do is to find best software combinations. I'm sure it will only get better with time.

best regards

 

Glad this helped you. Have fun with your burner.

 

You've never stated the model correctly, thus I couldn't find it. It is Pioneer bdC-TD03, with similar specs to the Matsita UJ240, it's probably the same OEM. Panasonic, Pioneer, and Sony drives are all used in the F-series.

 

yeh, I wrote what i saw in device manager as drive name (designation).
I was actually surprised to see Pioneer, not because it is worse or anything like that, but because Sony is always one of the first to release new optical drives/media/formats.

anyhow, again, Drive is working as expected with right software. If you are having issues with BD speeds on your Vaio, read this thread for tips.

best regards