PCTech Forums

From my dvd writer i get poor performance, it never writes at 4x and the read speed is very poor

I have used the Nero Info Tool which tells me i have a dvr 105 firmware 1.33
and can have Read speed of 6x and write speed of 4x

I use 4x disks and only writes at 1x, as it takes 45mins per dvd.
When using dvd decrypter the best read rate i get is usually 1.1x + 1.2x

I was wondering if its my system configuration and arrangement of hardware thats maybe making my dvd writer under perform

At the moment i have to hard drives inside plus the writer

The primary master hd 40gb is connected to the dvd writer which is set as slave

on the secondary i have a 80gb set as master.

Could having the dvd writer on the secondary master and moving the 80gb hard drive to primary slave make anything better?

Lee

2 things come into my mind. The devices on an IDE chain can only run as fast as the fastest device. Lets say you have one of the early 40 gig drives, that is an ATA 66 device. Your DVD rom will be an ATA 133 device, but it'll only run at ATA 66 because it's on the same chain as a slower device. Also, if you have an old IDE cable (40 wire) it'll never run faster than ATA 33. The newer cables have 40 pins, but have 80 wires to help elliminate cross talk (or signals jumping from one cable to the next)

To further slow your situation, if the file you are trying to burn "lives" on your Primary Master or 40 gig drive, the ide chain has to read the files from the hard drive and write the files to your DVD burner at the same time. This means they have to "share" the ATA 66 speed, meaning they only get 33 a piece.

hope that made sense to you.

Best bet for DVD writing. Put the DVD on it's OWN ide channel. Lets say secondary master. Put your hard drives on the Primary chain, leaving the 40 gig as master and the 80 gig as slave. File copys between drives would be slower, but you probably won't notice that as much as you'd think.

Another option would to buy a PCI IDE controller. I actually have a cheap SIL6080 card (sil6080 is the chipset) that is capable of doing IDE raid, but not required. Anyway, This gives me another primary and secondary chain, allowing me to have up to 8 IDE devices in my PC. This allows me to have 2 hard drives, a CDRW and a DVD RW all hooked to my pc, without having to "share" any of the speed.

hope this helps you

how do i do that, and how will i know if it is?

The swap file is usually 1 and 1/2 the times of memory on board. rt click my computer --left click advanced--lt click settings--lt click advanced and check it.

Now add that amount to the 4 gig for a dvd burn--is that total amount availble on the c drive?

My guess is that your system is paging back and forth to complete the operation

Or, if you're running WinXP, check to see if you have alot of processes running in the background. The system itself, if it lags, will become very unstabble, and have a great potential of either gowing REALLY slow, or crashing.

i have just changed my configuration

i have put the dvd writer on its own IDE, and got both my hard drives on the same one.


Just tried dvd decrypter and its working on average at about 2.2x which is 1x better than before, i started burning a full dvd, it first said would take 16mins, but then changed up to 32mins, and didnt go any higher, so it looks like its gonna burn at 2x now instead of 1x

It still doesnt explain why it isnt burning at 4x though

any further ideas???