i dont understand..scsi is a completley different format to ide and ata133 is only aplicable to RAID drives..the IDE figure you should be quoting is UDMAxxx. you dont put master and slave on scsi bus it usually allows up to 8 devices on a chain with the last one terminated.you cannot use ide devices on the scsi bus or visa versa!
Interesting to hear that you guys have issues when you change these settings. My comments are purely hardware based (and correct imho), but from what you're saying, sounds like either the OS or software can have problems if things aren't set up as expected. I guess the best thing to say is to read your manuals and do as they say. The points I want to reinforce are to make sure DMA is turned on, and to have the drives who will be talking the most to each other on different IDE channels. -mers PS Oriphius, that's what those L shaped metal things are for
lol :-D Here, speaking of DMA. Turning it on (as mine is) is great as it can speed things up. However, peoples problems have been fixed on a number of occasions by turning DMA off. Can you explain this if you are knowledgable about Hardware, because im not really :-D
D'oh. That's a tough one. Here are two possibilities (I don't expect you to believe me though, but it's the best I can come up with) ... 1) Turning off DMA means your CPU is doing a lot more work, so when you're burning, the burner's buffer doesn't get filled as fast, possibly causing burn-proof (or whatever it's called) to kick in. Could the fact that the burner isn't constantly writing possibly prevent coasters in flaky burners? 2) If the PC has a messed up DMA configuration (this might actually require effort to mess up), resorting back to programmed input-output (PIO) would fix things, albeit slowing I/O and making the CPU crunch like mad. Just a thought. -mers PS Why's a newbie giving an addict advice? No matter, you guys can author circles around me. I need to learn to make menus.
lol - my experienced is limited to DVD, Digital Video, Video Creation, LCD, Plasma (how it works), CRT and new SlimCRT, electrical goods, Photography, digital imaging and manipulation, Programming, Flash (as of two weeks ago) and a few other things. I know a fair bit about computers in general (i did a computer degree) but im not quite sure why the DMA is a problem with some. Your theory on the burn-proof kicking in may be a valid one. Im going to try to look into it more after i watched a good bit of soccer :-D
im a little confused as to which is good and which is bad advice now. DMA is direct memory access..like someone said having it on enables data to be transfered through memory without using the processor...its best to have this set to on for all your devices! this said your pc should have at least 512MB of memory if your using win xp because xp has loads of processes running in the background that take up upto 200MB alone(esspecially if you have a virus scan and firewall enabled all the time).if you only have 256MB of memory on win XP you can expect to run out of memory quite quickly especially when using video or audio editing apps. i find that the more times my recorder drops out(goes to burn proof)the worse the disk im creating will be..even to the extent that if it doesnt turn out a coaster there may be skips or clicks in the video and audio..turn down your settings so that the burner does a continuos burn and doesnt have to wait for the buffer to fill..same goes for cd writing! UDMA.is the fast DMA used mainly for hard drives u=ULTRA at the moment i think its upto 133.it makes little difference to burners and roms as they mostly operate at UDMA 33,though some of the newer models are comming out with UDMA 66 compatability. SCSI is completley different to IDE an IDE device wont even plug into an SCSI device.access times tend to be better on scsi drives because the bus can send and recieve data at the same time.IDE is like a one way system which sends data then recieves it.thats why its better to have your reader and burner on seperate ide channels.if you have lots of drives i recomend an add on card which will give you more ide channels.theyre not that expensive. hope some of this helps.good luck!
I see now where some confusion has crept into the posts. If you are burning from the HDD which is on the Primary cable then the DVDRW unit should and normally is on the Secondary cable where it will normally be the slave and is probably going to be UDMA 2. If you also have a DVD/CDROM as well then the advice is to make the DVDROM as master and the DVDRW as slave, ditto for a CDRW unit. It is also better to enable DMA for the HDD unit/s ,too which can be done through the system HDD settings. And the Direct Memory Access controller in the system section should also be set to 64kb with limit to 4GB unticked. Copying on the fly requires the Burning unit to be the slave. Enabling the DMA on both the ROM units is highly recommended. Your Bios settings can also affect how everything works so I personally use the CS jumper settings on both HDD and DVD/CD units and use the cable connections to decide which is master on the Ultra ATA166/100/133 special cable with the grey blue and black coloured connectors, which is very different from the CD/DVD unit's cables in current motherboards and also do the same for the DVDROM/RW/CD/CDRW units on the secondary master cable. Last connection(furthest from the motherboard connector) is the master in both cases. You perhaps also need to check the bios settings to make sure everything is correctly configured using the motherboard manual to select the correct settings for your motherboard. If you sre using ULTRA ATA cables better make sure the ULTRA ATA controller drivers are correctly installed, too. The manual will tell you how and the installation CD for the motherboard has all the drivers needed. Just make sure you/ve installed them!! and make sure you've read the manual, too. Having said all that, I also have a CDRW Aopen burner which will NOT burn using Nero 6 on one computer with an Intel Celeron 1.4Ghz cpu, Asus board. But Nero 6 will burn happily on another computer with AMD XP2400Ghz, Asus board with a DVDRW Ricoh 5125 burner. So CD blanks I thought were defective or non-compatible were in fact, fine. But I spent hours reinstalling yada yada and using language an old sea salt would have admired before I came to the conclusion that Aopen CDRW type CRW1232 did not want to work with Nero 6. LOL
I see now where some confusion has crept into the posts. If you are burning from the HDD which is on the Primary cable then the DVDRW unit should and normally is on the Secondary cable where it will normally be the slave and is probably going to be UDMA 2. If you also have a DVD/CDROM as well then the advice is to make the DVDROM as master and the DVDRW as slave, ditto for a CDRW unit. It is also better to enable DMA for the HDD unit/s ,too which can be done through the system HDD settings. And the Direct Memory Access controller in the system section should also be set to 64kb with limit to 4GB unticked. Copying on the fly requires the Burning unit to be the slave. Enabling the DMA on both the ROM units is highly recommended. Your Bios settings can also affect how everything works so I personally use the CS jumper settings on both HDD and DVD/CD units and use the cable connections to decide which is master on the Ultra ATA166/100/133 special cable with the grey blue and black coloured connectors, which is very different from the CD/DVD unit's cables in current motherboards and also do the same for the DVDROM/RW/CD/CDRW units on the secondary master cable. Last connection(furthest from the motherboard connector) is the master in both cases. You perhaps also need to check the bios settings to make sure everything is correctly configured using the motherboard manual to select the correct settings for your motherboard. If you sre using ULTRA ATA cables better make sure the ULTRA ATA controller drivers are correctly installed, too. The manual will tell you how and the installation CD for the motherboard has all the drivers needed. Just make sure you/ve installed them!! and make sure you've read the manual, too. Having said all that, I also have a CDRW Aopen burner which will NOT burn using Nero 6 on one computer with an Intel Celeron 1.4Ghz cpu, Asus board. But Nero 6 will burn happily on another computer with AMD XP2400Ghz, Asus board with a DVDRW Ricoh 5125 burner. So CD blanks I thought were defective or non-compatible were in fact, fine. But I spent hours reinstalling yada yada and using language an old sea salt would have admired before I came to the conclusion that Aopen CDRW type CRW1232 did not want to work with Nero 6. LOL
pete it really doesnt matter weather you burner is the master or slave.all that matters is that the source and the destination drives should be on seperate ide channels..even that isnt essential but its more reliable this way.i have an add on card which means i now have 4 ide channels so that i can keep devices seperate.my burner is on a channel of its own and is therefore the master.i dont have any trouble burning on the fly. with regards to turning off dma to correct problems with burning..if this is the case id suspect a memory stick with faulty blocks.even though the memory may appear fine to the pc some of the chips may have a faulty "circuit"so that when the pc trys to address this one block you get your errors..there are memory checking programs on lots of manufactures web sites..if you have cheap or budget memory you may be supprised to find out how much of it is actually faulty..i was..even though the pc works fine and does almost everything else without problems.buring dvd's with video is about the hardest your pc will ever work.it used to be this way with burning cd's but increased buffer sizes and drive speeds made modern pc's a breez for burning cd's.the files burned to a dvd are often 5x+ that of a cd.when the drives are 5x better.most of the problems will be fixed.
