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Pioneer UJ-85J (Matshita) in new iMac


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Hi everyone,

 

I just bought one of the new Core2Duo Intel iMacs and it has a Matshita UJ-85J dual layer DVD drive. I don't see any support information for it on the support site anywhere. Does anyone have any idea if this drive is supported?

 

I'm trying to configure it using the latest version of Retrospect 6.1 and the latest RDU. So far it rejects on the DVD-RW media. Perhaps Retrospect doesn't support the -R/-RW formats as with other DL drives. I'm trying +RW right now, but it's been taking a long time to blank. crazy.gif

 

Has anyone else tried using Retrospect on the new drives?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Any idea on how long it takes the Retrospect team to support a drive?

 

I can confirm that I am unable to configure the UJ-85J. I have tried a variety of DVD-R and DVD-RW material of varying speeds and brands (I had 4 different varieties on hand). They all end in failure.

 

I am basically dead in the water on backups until Retrospect provides support.

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I wish I knew the answer to that question since I'm dead in the water too. I've basically set up a backup scheme to temporarily backup to an external drive, but it's not ideal by any means since that HD is my juke box backup.

 

Seems silly that Retrospect works the way it does. Toast 6, not even the current version of Toast, burns to the new drive and recognizes the dual layer support. I didn't update Toast and it's really old! Someone on the Retrospect team should see how they're doing it so they don't have to write a silly driver every time a new drive comes out.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Still no love from Dantz for the new iMac. Hate to say it but the 6.1.8.101 RDU does not support the UJ-85J in the latest iMac. And it is not possible to configure the drive... at least I have not been successful.

 

Any word? Will Dantz support the iMac in the next RDU?

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hi lorax,

 

you may have missed this from above:

 

Quote:

Hi,

 

The Retrospect device team tries to make sure every drive shipped out with a Mac gets supported. If this is a brand new drive you might have to wait for support. You can keep an eye on the driver updates by subscribing to the RDU Announcement mailing list here:

 

 

 


 

did you sign up for the mailing list? it shows each device supported whenever a new RDU is released. you are asking other Retrospect users for internal information from EMC. perhaps you should call EMC Insignia Technical Support for more complete information. my guess is that they will give you the advice already supplied, however.

 

also, AFAIK there is no Dantz.

 

cheers.

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Yes, I read the whole mail thread.

 

Yes, I received the notification that a new RDU was delivered... thus my most recent post acknowledging that the RDU did not support the latest drive from Apple.

 

While EMC2 purchased Dantz, the acquisition is certainly not complete... take a look at the URL in your browser as you read this email, look at the URL you provide for the maillist, etc.

 

Feel free to skip my posts to the forum if they cause you angst. I was actually hoping for a response from another iMac owner who might have succeeded at the "configuration" process in the interim while we wait for an RDU. Or perchance a response from technical support.

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hi lorax,

 

i really feel you will get better answers by calling EMC directly. you are free to disagree, of course, and i could be wrong, but just asking the same question over and over doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. it just shows that people on this board don't know when this particular drive will be supported.

 

my feeling is that if your 'configuration' failed with this particular drive, why should someone elses succeed with the same exact drive? it's not like you can really mess up the process (and it's not magic). the only variable might be the manufacturer of the media. i can tell you that EMC Technical Support regularly recommends Verbatim and TDK optical media, and that packet writing (the method Retrospect uses) works better with the '+' style optical media (but not all drives support the '+' style media) but these aren't any great secrets. i wish you luck.

 

cheers.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Looks like no support for the UJ-85J yet: http://www.emcinsignia.com/supportupdates/technical/retrospect/search/?q=UJ-85J

 

Best bet is to get on the mailing list for RDU's

 

Trying to custom configure unsupported drives in Retrospect can be annoying - no real troubleshooting for those... it either works or it doesnt

 

Hard drives as backup media FTW! smile.gif

 

Good Luck!

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 months later...

Quote:

Seems silly that Retrospect works the way it does. Toast 6, not even the current version of Toast, burns to the new drive and recognizes the dual layer support.

 


 

Silly? How would you feel if your Optical Backup Set was unable to backup to the same partially-filled recordable disk over and over again until it was filled? Would you rather have it burn individual "sessions" the way Toast can, with each new burn resulting in a new volume and all its associated overhead?

 

Retrospect works the way it does (which is totally different then Toast or DiskBurner) so that it can backup small files or large files, span files large or small across disks, all without loosing large amounts of disk capacity to overhead.

 

Even when Dantz/Dantz-EMC/EMCInsignia was churning out device support updates more quickly, some drives were never qualified because the hardware wasn't capable of supporting packet writing reliably.

 

Dave

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Dave,

 

Thanks for the technical information. To answer your question, I'd rather have a product that works, by a company that continues to support its products. You mentioned that "Retrosect works the way it does..." Unfortunately, those of us with this particular drive still don't have Retrospect driver support, and therefore, Retrospect does not work. The last driver update was 2006-11-28. It's now four months later and still no new drivers. The new iMacs came out in September or October. You'd think that this drive would be supported by now!

 

What we'd like to know, as Retrospect customers considering dumping Retrospect for another product, is whether or not this drive will ever be supported and when. If it won't be supported and/or EMC can't give us a date when it will be, could someone give us some alternative products.

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Quote:

could someone give us some alternative products.

 


 

I know of no other product that can write incrementally to multiple media, spanning files across members as space requires.

 

Heck, I'd be happy to find a program that could write to multiple disk images for later (DAO) burning, but there's nothing that I know of that will do that, either.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Thank you guys a ton for writing back. The new driver update does in fact work with the UJ-85J drive (at least with a DVD+RW)! I was about a week away from purchasing a different piece of software, but I'll stick with Retrospect for now since it appears to be working.

 

Any idea why this drive isn't listed? Thanks again.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I had the same trouble with this DVD writer, and found this helpful. It now is configured, however, when I ran a script to backup large stuff (many gigabytes) it only was putting 1 GB on each DVD. Not good. Why is it doing this and what can I do about it?

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