I'm wondering if I have a problem here.

When I'm writing a DVD, the bar in the "Recorder Buffer Level / State" box goes left and right pretty steadily. The entire burn process it goes from about 99% down to about 10% and back up again. Now, I thought that this bar should stay full the entire time. Am I wrong about that? I only think there's a problem because my burning takes much longer than it should. For example, I'm burning a 2.9GB DVD at the moment, and it is at 32% after 21 minutes. At this rate it will take an hour when, at 2x, it should take about 17 minutes!

Now that I look at it, it appears that the read speed is fluctuating. Why is that? At the moment I only have IE open, and that's not taking up much resources, because I'm just typing.

Any suggestions?

It sounds like the buffer keeps bottoming out. Most of the new burners have underrun protection nowadays, and if the buffer hits zero, it will trigger the underun protection, stop the burn for a sec to refill the buffer, and keep going. It takes a lot longer than if everything is going smoothly. It sound like the media your recording from is just slower than the burner speed.

No, it should be 2x. Most DVD media is. Besides, it's consistantly doing this, going from 99% to about 10% and back, over and over, quite rapidly.

I fixed that read speed problem, and now it's taking only about half-again as long as it should to burn. I'd just like to fix the buffer now. I've Googled a lot for it, but can't find much.

I recently discovered that I did not have DMA enabled on my optical drives ( did on my hard disks). This fixed the problem.

However, I seem to be copying files from CDs veeery slowly. I have a 32x drive. I can't remember, what is 1x?

Anyway, what can I do to speed up file movement? Are there things I should be looking out for on my system?

1x is the standard rate of CD PCM audio playback, roughly 150kB/sec. 32x is equivalent to a saturated DS3 line, so i wouldn't exactly call that pokey. sounds like something's still not right with your setup.

--dan.

That sounds right. So by my calculations, the 605 MB file I was taking off the CD should have taken a little more than 2 minutes. Not even close. It took about 15 minutes.

Any ideas what it could be?

I'm no expert, but if your disc is less than 110% perfect, you will never get the stated speed. CD-ROMs will drop the speed to be able to read the CD. Some CD-ROMs also have different speeds depending whether they're reading audio or video.

Stig

Yeah, but 15 minutes would be about 4x speed. A 32x CDROM drive should read most data CDs at somewhere close to 32x speed.

Most CDROM drives only read at their maximum stated speed at the outer edge of the disc. But it should still average out to be much higher than 4x overall...

- Trevor

I have a friend who has a DVD drive that runs slowly without DMA enabled on it (obviously), but with DMA enabled, it apparently extracts incorrect data. Programs run from it (like an installer) usually fail, and DVD playback is glitchy. I blame it on being an off-brand DVD (Afreey?) and the VIA chipset on his motherboard. I haven't tried putting it on a PCI IDE controller yet.

Mine's a Sony DRU500A. It's becoming a very popular drive, and I don't think it would have those problems. Everything I'm taking off of it is slow, but works. It's strange because the extraction is just as slow as when DMA was disabled on the drive, so I'm not sure why it hasn't improved (and yes, I restarted my machine ).

Check to make sure it's still set. I've seen time where Windows sets it back without informing you. I don't know why.

Nope, it's still set. Plus, my problem in Nero was solved, so it changed there.