Does my drive cache audio or not?

2007-03-14 20:01:13

How can I be sure for 100% if my DVD+/-RW drive (Samsung 182M) does not (or does) cache audio. I have seen different results in reviews (they used EAC).
My own EAC says it does cache. But there is something strange. You know when the head finds bad block - red dots begin to appear.

When a drive caches audio and CACHE option is checked - every dot appears in the same interval
When a drive caches audio and CACHE option is unchecked - the first dot appears after some long time and other dots appear much faster (because of a drive has not to read CD once again - it takes data from cache)

When I uncheck 'Drive Caches Audio' dots appear very slow. So does it caches audio?
Any thoughts?

Does my drive cache audio or not?

Reply #1 – 2007-03-14 20:02:57

Search http://club.cdfreaks.com/ for a program called 'cachex'.  It will give you the info you need.

Does my drive cache audio or not?

Reply #2 – 2007-03-14 20:12:39

First, did you check to see that your drive is running in DMA mode and not in PIO mode?

Assuming your drive is running in DMA mode...

Does EAC ever tell you  that you have a read error with the setting unchecked when ripping a scratched disc?

If your drive caches audio data and you uncheck the setting, EAC will only report sync errors; it will not report read errors.  Also, re-read sets will occur very very rapidly and either one row of error correction will illuminate or all of them will (giving you a sync error), but never anything in between.

EDIT: I misread the original post earlier.