I am using an Intel 875 motherboard with two 160G Maxtor SATA hard drives, 1GB of memory and a Pioneer DVR107-D. I am using cheap 4X DVD-Rs from Digital Matrix and initially thought that they were the reason that I am getting freeze-ups on my burned DVDs about 2/3 of the way through. I was using DVD Shrink straight to the burn. I thought maybe it was DVD Shrink, so I rendered to disk and then used Nero 6 for the burn. Still had problems burning at 4X. Burning at 2X works fine. I did a speed check in Nero without writing, and found that the read speed was too low to burn at 4X. It appears that my computer is not providing the data fast enough. I looked for Use DMA if available and turned that on for the IDE controllers, but there is no DMA for the SATA drives. Does anyone have any idea why I am getting reading speeds that are so low?
This Plus this Plus this Equals the need to try better media such as Verbatim or Ritek. Cheap media often doesn't live up to it's speed rating and ends up giving poor results if it does.
I agree about the media, but this doesn't explain why I get the slow source read rate when I select determine speed before burning in Nero 6. I unselected the write checkmark so I just get the speed check.
Updated SATA drivers may help, if available. Are you putting any other load on the drive while performing the test? Have you tried running HDTach on the drive? It may yield some useful information It's a trial version that will test everything but write speed. http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach
I don't have anything other apps running. I downloaded the hard disk diagnostic and the drive speed came out low of 35MB/sec with an average of 65MB/sec. Plenty of speed. I also tried a Nero 6 speed check on another computer that I am building as a file server for a client. It is configured very similiarly with a 2.8MHz P-4, 1GB of memory and two Western Digital 10,000 RPM SATA drives. It also gave the same message that the Verbatim 4X DVD+Rs could only be written at 2X because the data source was not fast enough. The drives seem to be operating correctly because the HD diagnostic comes out about what I would expect. I think it has something to do with Nero 6, but I haven't found anything on their site so far. The drives in my original machine were two Maxtor 160GB SATA drives.
Just for giggles and grins you might try using DVD Decrypter (free) to burn. What you'll want to do is use Decrypter in ISO Read mode: Mode > ISO > Read - then let it do it's thing. Now open Shrink and and go to File, then "Open Disc Image". Now hit the "Backup!" button. When the new window opens, under "Select Target Device" choose "ISO Disc Image" and under "Select target image file" choose the ISO that Decrypter just made. In the same window, at the bottom, check the box that says "Launch DVD Decrypter to burn the output image". Click OK. Maybe trying this will shine some light on whether it's a problem with Nero or otherwise?
Thanks, I'll try that. In the meantime, I sent an email to tech support at Nero and I am updating Nero to the latest build. I'll see if either of these fixes the problem and let you know.
I just finished installing an update to Nero 6 to bring it to 6.3.1.6 and it now burns my Digital Matrix 4X DVD at 8X using the DVR-107D v1.10 - RPC-1 + 12xRip + 8xDVD-R patch. My read speed is now 41.4X. So much better than 2X buring and the burn was perfect.
