Hello, I have a TDK 840g 8X dvd+r burner and recently I bought some Ritek DVD+R 8X media to record from. I was under the impression that this media would burn an entire dvd with this burner at under 8 minutes on 8X speed. What I'm experiencing is more than a let down. I'm not sure if Meritline has sold me some Bogus media or if its a problem with my computer. Wondering if anyone can shed any light on this. [bold]System:[/bold] 133mhz mobo bus Athalon XP 1900+ Win2K Professional 1 GB Ram TDK 840G dvd+r burner Did I miss anything? Below is the screen capture of the entire burn with this burner and this Media. Do you think this lengthy burn problem may be because of my relatively slow mobo bus speed? I plan on building a new tower this summer and if thats all this is i can suffer until then I guess but it would be nice to know if the media is bunk or the burner. I copied a dvd with DVDXcopy and a 4x disc and the entire process including the decoding took nearly 2 hours. I read one guys post in another forum who claims to have burned a copy of a DVD with that same program, same burner and same media. Any help to offer? Thanks, Laz
No way on Earth he burnt a 3GB 8x disc in 2 minutes, thats pushing 16-20x speeds, which are just not capable at the minute. Bet you he told you he was an astronaut as well lol ;-) On your speed problem, an 8x disc should not take nearly 1 hour 30 mins to burn. There is obviously a problem. Even if it was dodgy 8x media, 4x or even 2x media, it should still not take anywhere near tha length of time. There is a problem with system/writer or both.
The guy's definitely in space if he's claiming 3GBin two minutes. Do you have DMA enabled for your burner? Have you ever been able to burn in less time or has it always taken this long?
Well I'm fairly new to the DVD burning game since i just got this burner for Christmas. I was not able to get ahold of any 8x media for awhile since it was sold out so i bought 4x Ritek media the first go round. That also seemed really slow to me and burns took an awefully long time. As I said about dvdxcopy it took me nearly 2 hours to decode and copy one dvd movie. I assumed that 4X was just really slow and that the pace would be picked up immensely with 8x media. Much to my shagrin it was not. [bold]DMA[/bold] enabled? is that a setting somewhere within my burning software or a hardware setting in bios or something? Ive never seen that before. How can i go about looking for this or how can i perform some test to see if this burner is up to snuff? If the burner is not performing properly then i need to bring it back i suppose. I am not having problems successfullt burning disks but they just burn too damn slow. lmao. Any help on the subject would be greatly appreciated.
Success! Thank you [bold]Nephilim[/bold] for pointing me in the right direction. I did a little research and others have had this same problem with the secondary IDE controller being set for PIO by default. I guess I had never thought to check that. I assumed when I installed this that it would just perform to whatever level it would bear without other configuration changes. I had read that some people actually had to delete the secondary IDE controller and then upon reboot it would reinstall with DMA activated when it read the hardware that was on it. This was not the case with me however. I was able to just change the setting over to DMA and when i rebooted it came back saying that ULTRA DMA was activated. I immediately felt compelled to burn one to test it out and this time i was very pleased with the results. It is now performing as an 8X burner with 8X media should. hehehe. Below is the outcome of that burn with a TDK 840g byrner, Nero 6.3.0.2 and Ritek dvd+r 8x media. Thank you once again for bringing this to my attention or I may have been doomed to slow burns for some time to come and the enjoyment of having a dvd burner would have been null and void.
I would have thought so. I'm not sure about WinXP but I am running Win2k SP3 and it did not evidently. In my Primary IDE controller that hosts both of my hard drives, the advanced settings were indeed set to ultra DMA mode but under the secondary IDE controller both of my devices(dvd-rom and dvd-rw) were both set to PIO for the transfer mode. I would think that when you install a new device that windows would at least ask you what you prefer. It brings up a found ne hardware wizard for plug-n-play devices but maybe since an optical drive doesn't require any special drivers it just leaves all the default settings alone. What the heck is "PIO" anyways? rofl.
Here is some info from CDRinfo IDE hard disks are accessed in one of two ways: PIO (Programmed Input/Output) or DMA (Direct Memory Access). There are 5 different PIO modes, from slowest (0) to fastest (4). The highest is normally used when the drive is automatically detected. Best check in your BIOS. PIO: Traditionally, the transfer method for IDE devices has been PIO where data is transferred to/from IDE devices using the CPU. PIO requires a relatively large amount of dedicated CPU time (40%), especially when transferring large amounts of data to/from hard disk drives. Transfer speeds may be in the region of 16MB/sec. DMA: DMA allows for the transfer of data to/from IDE devices without heavy dependence on the CPU and increases transfer speeds. Its operation requires a Bus Master driver.(It uses Bus Master IDE (BM-IDE) logic contained within the PIIXn IDE controller. The PIIXn IDE controller acts as a PCI Bus Master on behalf of IDE DMA slave devices, performing DMA transfers to/from devices on primary or secondary IDE channels). UDMA: Newer Intel chipsets (PIIX3 and later) can perform fast DMA transfers using the UltraDMA/33 hardware interface. UDMA is an abbreviation of Ultra DMA. Its operation requires its own Bus Master driver. Speeds of 33MB/sec can, theoretically, be achieved. These can be a boost to speed - but mostly under certain circumstances. Disk-intensive applications will benefit from UDMA's increased throughput, and applications stored on the UDMA hard drive will load faster. Bootups should be faster.
