Optical Drive Testing

This is a draft of a new or in-progress document, and is likely to have a few people specifically working on it. You may wish to check in on the discussion page to see what the purpose of the document is and who's working on it; then feel free to give this article love and attention if have extra of those things.

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Instructions for using K3B to test optical drives will be here in the near future!

For now please use the old instructions at Optical_Drive_Testing_10.04

Setting Up

1. Select a drive to test from the bins under the workbench. Check for the following:
   1. Interface type and functionality - Prioritize more desirable drives such as DVD-RW DL and drives with SATA connections.
   2. Damage and dirt - Is anything broken or missing? If so, recycle it! Is it filthy? Try to clean it up, but if it would take a herculean cleaning effort to get it into a condition that you would consider saleable then just recycle it.
   3. Manufacture date - If the drive was manufactured in 2003 or earlier, recycle it!
   4. Jumpers (IDE Only) - Make sure the jumpers are configured so the device is set to Master. On most drives this is accomplished by placing a single jumper vertically between the pins closest to the IDE connection, though other configurations are possible. Often times a chart will be present on the drive's label.
2. Make sure that the testing station is powered off, then attach the drive to the testing station's IDE or SATA cable. If the device requires a SATA power connector you will need to attach the converter to the standard molex power connector.
3. Boot the system into Ubuntu. Note that the current testing station has BIOS settings for expected drives and may complain that it has not detected all expected drives; this message can be bypassed with a keypress (though is grounds for current considerations of testing system replacement).

Pay close attention to the capabilities of the drives you are testing. There are many different types of drives with many different combinations of functions that you need to be aware of when you are testing optical drives.
-The basic features on the drives we test:
CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD ram
-These features are often combined into a combo drive, examples:
CD-R/DVD-RW, CD-RW/DVD-R, CD-R/DVD+RW.

Testing Playback

1. Insert an audio CD into the disc drive and Rhythmbox should start automatically.
   1. If Rhythmbox doesn't start, go to 'Applications' → 'Sound & Video' → 'Rhythmbox Music Player.' When it opens, look for the testing audio CD under 'Devices' on the left and select it.
2. Click the play button to start the music and let it play for for at least 15 seconds to make sure there is no skipping during playback. If you encounter skipping be sure to check the CD and try another one in case it's just a scratch on the media.
3. Skip to a later track on the disc and let the music play for 15 seconds again, still listening for skipping.
4. Exit Rhythmbox and eject the disc. If there were no playback issues then proceed with testing! If the audio skipped or a track could not be played then recycle the drive.