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The DVD Burner Optiarc AD-7170A is the first DVD burner that was made by the new optical storage company Optiarc - an alliance of NEC's and Sony's former optical storage departments. The drive was announced in July 2006. The Optiarc AD7173 burner adds support for LabelFlash but both drives share the same hardware and only differ in firmware. However you should not try to simply flash an Optiarc 7173 firmware on an Optiarc 7170 drive or vice versa. This will NOT work. Sony distributes these drives under their own brand, labelling them Sony AW-G170A (Optiarc AD-7170A) and Sony AW-G173A (Optiarc AD-7173A)
In December Optiarc released the Serial-ATA versions of these drives. These drives can be recognized by the letter S instead of A after the model number, e.g. AD-7170S instead of AD-7170A.
CD Freaks published an Optiarc AD-7173A First Look article and a Sony AW-G170A preview.
Click here for detailed specifications of the Optiarc AD7170A.
The following firmwares are available for download here:
Overview on the used writing strategies
Please note that flashing these drives will currently not work in UDMA 4 mode. Please use PIO mode instead. Not doing so may result in an "Error submitting checksum" error message.
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