HankScorpio

Sony 4x drive, 8x DVD-R media, no matter what app I use (sonice, nero, deepburner, some veritas thing), I only get about 400Mb in 5 minutes.

Any clues/pointers?

spectrum48k

People sometimes have two devices plugged into a single socket on the motherboard (master and slave)

Your burner may be competing for bandwidth with the other device?

You may also want to check if your burner's firmware is up to date - visit your manufacturers website to see if there's any updates.

Scooby Dooby Blue

Assuming approx 45secs lead in/lead out
400mb will probably initialise at a max of 4x burn which would equate to a couple of minutes anyway.

All in, a 3min burn would be the quickest you could expect to rattle off a 400MB burn.

To check if the drive's operating at it's maximum speed, burn a full 4GB onto a disc. This should take about 13mins at 4x or 9mins at 8x

HankScorpio

Thanks for the responses chaps, but...

Firmware up to date, only device on the ide bus (hdds are SATA).

3.7 gb burn, currently 94% complete after 47 minutes!!!

Daz34

Have you tried Nero Toolkit?
At about £25 for a new 16x drive though, I would probably just bin it.

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Couple of other things to try:

Checked the device manager to see if the drive is running in UDMA mode

Updated to New IDE drivers

D16GER

Are you using anything else on the system whilst it burns? Sometimes this can slow it down.

Also, as stated above, check the drive is set to the correct DMA mode.

If your system needs chipset drivers, you could try updating those too.

List your full system specs if you can, will help diagnosis.

HankScorpio

Now that's my kind of troubleshooting!

Didn't realise they were so cheap nowadays, last time I looked they were about 70.

Thanks for the other suggestions but I CBA to do all the rest if I can get cheapo replacement.

lightning101

Buy the pioneer 111d or the NEC 4570, they write on anything and firmware is always available

Both under £30 inc vat and include DVD-RAM

sienar33

Test and burn will almost double the disk time
If the source data is coming from a slow device (USB1 ext HDD) that could be slowing it up

HankScorpio

Decision made, it's a new drive!!

What's the thoughts on LG? Or should I stick with Pioneer or NEC as suggested by lightning?
Don't want another sony.

D16GER

Personally I would go with the Pioneer. All the major disc fabricators test their discs using Pioneer writers, so that can't be a bad thing.

I have had mine for 3 years or so now and it has been flawless.

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Or if you can't get hold of the Pioneer go with the NEC. Read somewhere that Pioneer use the NEC electronics, or vice versa. Both a win win.

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

No wonder it's slow if its a 4X drive! using 8x discs would only burn at 4x speeds anyway, how old was your drive?

HankScorpio

Still nowhere near 4x....

D16GER

Buying a new drive may not be the answer. If there is an underlying issue, then it will still be there with the new drive.

It would be better to figure out what the issue is now, then buy the new drive, rather than buy the new drive and cuss at it when it's still slow.

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Good point. Also what spec of PC is HankScorpio got?

HankScorpio

AMD XP2200, Gig Ram, 2xSATA striped disks, XP SP2 and a crap DVD writer.

But I'm getting a new one anyway, if that doesn't work, then I'll check it out further. Couple of guys at work who bought the same drive have also had problems so I'm binning it and getting a faster DL drive, if that doesn't go as fast as I want I will investigate further.
Life's too short.

Thanks for the input.

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Indeed it is...