Thinkpads Forum

I wanted one forever, but they used to be $600+. (43N3230, UJ-242 Matshita/Panasonic drive, info link: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product ... MIGR-73197)

Finally got a good deal on one, but I note that the firmware is "v1.0", the manufacture date is 2010-10 and I'm not that happy with the writing speeds it offers me on some of my favorite DVD+R DL media.

I couldn't find any firmware updates on either Lenovo's website or anywhere else to see if I can improve that.

Has anyone who has one of these ever found updated firmware for them anywhere?

How long do your burns take? A full BD burn at 2x, which is the speed for the UJ-242 using BD-R DLs, I think takes around 45 minutes. Typically, a firmware upgrade fixes bugs or improves write quality, but doesn't improve burn speed. New drives that can burn faster have better parts, which isn't an option for an older drive.

In my experience, many optical drive firmware updates improve media compatibility as well, which often means "can burn at higher speeds", in addition to often improving general burning quality.

If you note my question, it pertained to DVD+R DL media, not BD-R DL media.

Actually I haven't tested it much at all at this point because A) I just got it, B) I don't have any BluRay media here right now (only place I use BluRay right now is at work) and unfortunately I just found that one of my main external backup drives showed up with partition corruption when I tried to use it yesterday and the LT is preoccupied doing a ridiculously long drive scan of that drive (ie 20 hours) in the hopes of recovering the data off of it. So more testing of the shiny new optical drive will have to wait a while I'm afraid...

FWIW: I only get offered 2.4x writing speed on all the DVD+R DL media I tried here.