I have read that using a slow write speed is a good idea so I use 4x when I burn my dvds...my room mate just got nero on his computer and I recommended to him to use 4x as well however when he burns at 4x write speed on his computer it take at the most 30mins to burn a dvd5 movie and for me it can tak an hour or more. I was curious what the difference between our computers may be that would cause his to write so much faster than mine at the same 4x write speed. Does memory or hard disc space play a role? I was never really bothered waiting an hour or so for my dvd to write but the fact that his is so much faster I was hoping I might be able to make some changes and write equally as fast. It was my assumption earlier that a dvd at 4x would take the same amount of time regardless of the computer but my room mate has proven me wrong...my computer is a lot older than his so i guess that plays a role.
it could be ram your cpu etc. if its really old (less than 256MB of ram and a small cpu?) but most likely its a DMA issue with your drive. check make sure your drive/burner in in DMA mode in device manager and not in PIO mode you can fix it by uninstalling the IDE controllers rebooting and letting reinstall them correctly or use this guide http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/260038 burning at 6x to 8x max should work fine theres really no need to burn that slow (4x) anymore
I think that justadub is mistaken about WRITE speeds and is talking about processing speed that Nero is taking. Write speed is the speed of writing to a disk. What justadub is talking about is how long it takes Nero to process the project and then write to the disk. If a stop watch was used to see how long it would take to write to a disk then you might come out with these times: 4x might take 20mins or less to write to disk 8x might take 15mins or less 12x might take 10mins or less 16x might take 8mins or less but the process of a program to take a store bought DVD (a dual layer DVD of 7.6Gb or higher) to convert/shrink to a DVD5 single layer DVD then write to the disk is Processing time and write time together. then ZoSoIV is correct. If your computer is old then it would take a long time (like justadub has stated). the newer the computer the better the processor the faster the time to process and then the burner can write to disk! the writing time at the speeds stated above is a constant because that has to do with disk speed and writing to that disk... so no matter how fast your computer is those writing speed will stay the same! It's the processing time that will speed up.
Thanks for the replys! So really the whole slow proccessing is just a reflection of my older computer and there is not a lot that can be done? I was thinking about upgrading from 1/2gig of ram to 1gig. But anyways thanks for the info. it is greatly appreciated.
1) Processor speed/ram usually the factor in controlling the backup process time. Make sure your DMA/UDMA's aren't in Pio Mode. 2)Having a clean OS also helps out. My old P3 celeron was a great backup producing machine. Only 498 mhz,she'd still take well under an hour for the dvd backup process at a 4x burn speed using dvd shrink/nero. After the gf downloaded Yahoo messenger and some other crap,it slowed that pc down to a crawl. So now what took me 1 hr to backup,would take 24 hrs to backup because of this. Spyware/malware can do a number. 3)Programs can affect backup time: Take that same P3 machine using dvd shrink. Now if I rip or re-rip a dvd-5 that needs no compression, I can use IMG burn. Less than 5 mins to rip and 15 mins for a 4x burn. 20 min backup,15 min copies once the files are on the hd. Actually the P3 machine is faster with Imgburn than my present 3300+ Celeron machine. If there's no compression,there's faster ways to back it up as apposed to the compressing dvd-9's to dvd-5. 4) Main thing with backup process time,is how much compression and if using any quality enhancements.Size matters when it comes to the size of the disc you are ripping.Majority of original dvds are dvd-9 and have a lot of extra crap. These have to be compressed to fit a blank dvd-5. Compression bogs down a pc and adds to the process time. Adding quality AEC enhancements with programs like dvd shrink, will add more time to the backup process. This is why 1 movie with 5% compression may take 30 mins to backup,but a movie with 40% compression takes over an hour. Reduce compression then you reduce the backup process time. If you want to burn faster,make sure you have a quality burner and use quality media like taiyo yuden,verbatim. Just because you may want to burn faster,doesn't mean your stand alone players will play them perfectly.
My C drive is almost full and I can't find that many misc. media files that are taking up space to delete or move. I think I might have to format it soon. I just burned a dvd where the files where on the C drive and it took 12 minutes but most of the files i am burning are on my external hard drive so that may play a role as well. Thanks for all the help and sugestions!!
I set my cousin up the same as mine. He picked up an 80 gb HP external harddrive. I borrowed it,hooked it up to both my pcs and loaded some data on there for him. Both my main pc and backup athlon 3000+ pc really slowed down after that. I had to reformat that 3000+ to get it back up to speed. My main pc still isn't as fast as it was before hooking up that external drive. Ever since that fiasco,I am no fan of any external drives. Internal all the way along with 40 pin/80 wire ribbons. I do run dual internal harddrives in both pcs. Harddrives are getting very cheap now and very easy to install if you have the room. Keep the compression down and it'll keep your backup process time down. That's the main time hog in the dvd backup process. 4x burn speed is recommended with most brands. The only exception,high quality media. The high quality Verbatim and Taiyo yuden were designed to be burned faster. The other 16x manufacturers, you probably gotta keep it under 8x to get optimum performance. Burning +16x verbatim at 2.4x caused crc errors. 4x burns were loaded with errors,but no crc errors. 8x and 12x burns scored the best with nero's disc quality scanning program. You can use that nero program to see how your your backups score at different speed rates with all the various media you come across. I burn according to how the scans score for each of my burners.
I have 2 externals and I use them extensively for recordings! I have never seen any slow down on my computer at all! I don't believe that externals would inhibit the speed of a computer. But you mentioned HP.... then I can believe anything. HP isn't what it used to be. I used to like their printers but then they became cheaply made and I switched to Epson which is much better. The only thing HP I have is a scanner which is adequate and does the job that it's intended to do. But don't blame things on external drives. My Maxtors are great!
