New 4x burners and buffer underrun protection/"burnproo

[MarcoEsc]

Hi all:

After a stretch of borrowing a friend's DVD burner in a Firewire enclosure, it's time for me to buy my own. I'm leaning toward the NEC 1300A or the Pioneer A06, based largely on reviews I'm reading here.

QUESTION: How are these drives as far as buffer underrun protection goes? I want to be able to continue using my computer while I burn, without forcing errors. My Plextor CD burner is rock solid and NEVER kicks out coasters...I can burn while doing pretty much anything else.

How are the DVD burners in this regard? Am I able to keep "working" while burning? My PC is not very high-end: PIII-800 running Win2K (though I'll probably upgrade to XP in order to run Adobe Premiere Pro)

Also links for the best deals on DVD burners are appreciated, especially if they accept PayPal.

Marco

[lordsmurf]

Don't do that. It may work, but burning DVDs is not like CDs, and the protection is not as foolproof considering data goes through much faster in larger quantities, and would overrun a buffer of ANY size in short time, protected or not if you force the system into overuse.

I can check e-mail or type Web pages while burning, but try to scan photos or encode video... and there goes the neighborhood. And I've got a top-of-the-line P4 system with the works.

[Dubber]

I got the NEC 1300A on an older Celeron 600 PC and was very concerned whether it'd be too slow to make good DVD burns. Nope, works great, I mostly burn at 2x to 2.4x only and buffer is always at ~95%.
I do other things on the PC at the same time too, but nothing like encoding using TMPGEnc May be Word, Excel, net browsing and such.

P.S. I run Win2K too, XP would make things tooooooo slow as it uses more system resources.

[lordsmurf]

But 2x and 4x are worlds apart in usage.

[MarcoEsc]

Lordsmurf, can you elaborate? "Worlds apart in useage." Does that mean I should just not expect successful 4x burns, or only if burning w no other processes running, or what?

I'm ready to buy my first burner and want to get the right one. I produce public access TV programming and will be creating a lot of copies of my own shows, so ability to burn quickly and effectively is of most importance.

Any other machine recommendations? I'm really looking at that NEC (with new firmware) or the Pioneer...is the more expensive Sony also more "burnproof"?

[lordsmurf]

Lordsmurf, can you elaborate? "Worlds apart in useage." Does that mean I should just not expect successful 4x burns, or only if burning w no other processes running, or what? I'm ready to buy my first burner and want to get the right one. I produce public access TV programming and will be creating a lot of copies of my own shows, so ability to burn quickly and effectively is of most importance. Any other machine recommendations? I'm really looking at that NEC (with new firmware) or the Pioneer...is the more expensive Sony also more "burnproof"?

You cannot compare system performance while burning 2x to the system performance during a 4x burn. The 4x burn is twice as demanding.

They are all fine. But if you insist on doing things while burning, at least something that requires significant system resources, don't be surprised if you end up with bad burned or outright failures.

The slower burn requires less (though still far exceeding that of most CD burns). That's it. And it is dependent on WHAT you want to do. Again, rendering 3D graphics is far more of a "usage" than just checking e-mail while burning. With video, you need to try to only do one thing at a time.

[MarcoEsc]

Cool, thanks for the update. I would like to be able to continue to do "lower impact" activities while burning: reading Web sites and e-mail, for example. I guess I'll learn and see what happens.