Hi all, Had the drive operating fine on my machine for almost a year. Suddenly it now takes FOREVER to copy a disc (about 2 hours for a regular Verbatim DVD-R, which only took about 20 minutes before using media from the same spindle) I'm using Nero and had this problem before after I received an error from Nero saying it couldn't copy the disc. However after re-installing Nero and everything else the drive worked fine after re-installing the firmware (version C) I'm having the same problem now and re-installed the firmware and Nero with no luck. One thing I did notice with Nero is in the preview window when I am copying DVD's the video preview is much more jittery than before (I also De-fragged my Hard Drive as well) I also checked the drive and DMA is enabled. Again everything worked fine for almost a year and I made no hardware changes.
I know you said you checked the DMA settings. BUT, it sure sounds like this could be a problem. Check the DMA settings, again, for both the primary AND secondary channels. My secondary slipped into PIO once and it created LONG burn times and slow speeds on my DRU-820a. Alternatively, you could uninstall the drivers, reboot, and let them be reinstalled fresh. Sometimes this can clear a hiccup in the system.
Yes, re-installing the driver a couple of times (including physically pulling the burner), no luck. DMA is set to when available on everything. Interesting thing though, on 1 controller I have 2 hard drives and on the decondary controller I have a hard drive as slave and the DVD burner as master (not sure if that's on the primary or secondary though, is there a way to tell? I forgot)Again with this configuration everything worked fine until 2 days ago. However one of the master devices is set to DMA but shows PIO mode which might be the burner. Even when I re-install the driver this won't change it.
Run the Nero InfoTool (configuration tab) if you have Nero installed on your machine. I looked at mine and it shows the Primary IDE Channel Master as my harddrive (I believe), and the Secondary IDE Channel Master as my DRU-820a and Slave as another cd burner. Also mentions DMA as ON in each case.