My Optorite CW4002 has been exhibiting an odd issue. It will no burn over 32x, despite being a 40x CDRW drive. I have known good disks (newer build Ritek 40x), and it outright refuses to burn faster.

Here’s a screenshot using Nero’s CDTest on my PC with the 100E firmware:

And now, with the updated 110E firmware:

Yes, it’s now degraded to 12x!

The disk hasn’t fallen back into PIO mode, so I am a bit curious as to issues with this drive. I’ve since downgraded back to the 100E firmware, and will settle for 32x until I manage to find out what’s wrong with the disk. Optorite is also rather confused about this… of obvious reasons!

[Edit:]

Update:

Optorite released firmware 120E, and that seems to have fixed these problems

Without looking too hard into their EEPROM, it looks like they updated their manufacturer codes, thus the drive will burn at this faster, advertised speed for known media.