Cannot burn DVD+Rs with NEC ND-3500A

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

I just got a NEC ND-3500A DVD burner.

After a couple false starts, I compiled a kernel with device atapicam
turned on hw.ata.atapi_dma=1 in /boot/loader.conf, created an image
with mkisofs (yeah I know this is not necessary, but old habits die
hard), popped a blank DVD+R in the drive, and finally ran

; time growisofs -dvd-compat -speed\=4 -Z /dev/cd0\=mp3-dvd2.iso
Executing 'builtin_dd if=mp3-dvd2.iso of=/dev/pass0 obs=32k seek=0'
/dev/pass0: "Current Write Speed" is 6.1x1385KBps.
         0/4676134912 ( 0.0%) @0x, remaining ??:??
         0/4676134912 ( 0.0%) @0x, remaining ??:??
         0/4676134912 ( 0.0%) @0x, remaining ??:??
         0/4676134912 ( 0.0%) @0x, remaining ??:??
   5439488/4676134912 ( 0.1%) @1.1x, remaining 300:31
  22446080/4676134912 ( 0.5%) @3.6x, remaining 82:55
[... this looks very normal to me, but it ends like this ...]
4654235648/4676134912 (99.5%) @4.0x, remaining 0:03
4673339392/4676134912 (99.9%) @4.0x, remaining 0:00
/dev/pass0: flushing cache
/dev/pass0: closing track
- [unable to TEST UNIT READY]: Input/output error
   854r     0.2u    20.2s       growisofs -dvd-compat -speed=4 -Z /dev/cd0=mp3-dvd2.iso


Ouch.  Is anything bad known about this drive?  Any problems with it
on FreeBSD?  Or perhaps I just got a bad drive and need to get it
replaced?  Always an iffy proposition for hardware that nominally
requires windows...  Or maybe the disks are bad?  (They're Sentinels,
on sale in the local bookstore.)

Or did I miss something?

Here is what I think may be pertinent information:

; sysctl hw.ata
hw.ata.ata_dma: 1
hw.ata.wc: 1
hw.ata.atapi_dma: 1

The OS is 5.2.1-RELEASE, and the drive shows up as follows in dmesg:

acd0: DVDR <_NEC DVD_RW ND-3500AG> at ata1-master UDMA33
SMP: AP CPU #1 Launched!
cd0 at ata1 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
cd0: <_NEC DVD_RW ND-3500AG 2.16> Removable CD-ROM SCSI-0 device 
cd0: 33.000MB/s transfers
cd0: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present

The drive reads both CD-Rs and DVD-Rs just fine.  I haven't tried
burning any CDs yet.  Heck, I got it because I am drowning in CDs...

The CPU is a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 in a Shuttle cabinet.

- Harald