A friend of mine mentioned he had a lot of luck (ie, created less coasters) with the DRU-510A - so when I saw the DRU-530A I decided to buy that instead. However I've never been able to burn with it reliably at anything faster than 2x. It's a bit of a pain when the main reason I bought that model over the 510A was that it had a max of 8x instead of 4x. Anyway, I think today the reason has become a lot clearer.. consider the following 2 products:
DRU-510A SONY SONY DRU-510A 4x4 Dual Format DVD Writer, DVD+R 4x, DVD+RW 4x, DVD-R 4x, DVD-RW 2x, DVD-ROM 12x, CD (16x24x32x), 8MB Buffer, Retail Pack
DRU-530A SONY SONY DRU-530A 8x4 Dual Format DVD Writer, DVD+R 8x, DVD+RW 4x, DVD-R 4x, DVD-RW 2x, DVD-ROM 12x, CD (40x40x24x), 2MB Buffer, Retail Pack
Yes that's right.. the DRU-530A has a higher maximum possible write speed, but only has 2mb buffer instead of 8mb buffer - how the hell was that ever going to work out? Anyone want to swap their DRU-510A for my DRU-530A? Fuck I hate hardware.