I have a Pioneer 111 in an external case, and my Mac runs 10.4.7.

A lot of burns fail, both with Toast and with a program that is a
wrapper for cddao. Using the latter, for instance, a recent burn never
reached Track 1, coming up with the following error messages:

Drive accepted cue sheet variant 0.
Writing track 01 (mode AUDIO/AUDIO )...
?: Input/output error. : scsi sendcmd: no error
CDB: 2A 00 00 00 01 9E 00 00 0D 00
status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION)
Sense Bytes: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Sense Key: 0xFFFFFFFF [], Segment 0
Sense Code: 0x00 Qual 0x00 (no additional sense information) Fru 0x0
Sense flags: Blk 0 (not valid)
resid: 30576
cmd finished after 180.001s timeout 180s

I've googled for this error, and found some references, but they were
pretty incomprehensible and certainly didn't come up with an
explanation.

Some possible causes are:

Poor quality disks. Unlikely, as the same brand of CD (Imation) that
failed at 4x speed on the Pioneer has no trouble recording at 8x on the
internal drive.

Incompatibility of disk and drive. I don't know if this occurs often
with CD-R.

Software issues. Again unlikely, as both Toast and the other software
work fine on the internal drive.

Problems with the case and its interface. This is what I think is most
likely, the case has both Firewire and USB2 connections, and uses a
Prolific chipset. I have been using the Firewire connection, both via a
hub and directly connected to my Mac. I suppose I should also try
connecting via USB, and maybe changing the Firewhire cable if I can find
another one.

I am wondering if there is any further diagnosis I could do. I don't
want to go to the hassle and expense of buying another cable or another
case unless they are likely to solve the problem.

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