I recently bought a TDK 840g DVD writer because I burn alot of DVDs, and 4x isn't cutting it. I've read that burning 4x media at 8x is pretty reliable as long as you use good media. I use TDK mostly, and it *should* be the most compatible because the writer is TDK. Let's face it, TDK would look pretty dumb if their own media couldn't be used. Anway, my DVD writer was a SONY 500AX that I put in a ADS case (both firewire and USB 2.0) and it worked great. I even use a 250GB Western Digital firewire drive daisy chained with the DVD writer, and I can burn isos from the 250GB at 4x with no problems. I figured that I'd put the 8x TDK writer in there and it would work great, but it doesn't.

I've put the dvd writer in my computer and burned 4x media at 8x without glitches when I plugged it into the IDE channel and used it that way. The drive starts burning at 6.0x for about 1/5 of the CD, then you hear the drive spin up to 8.0x and burn consistently every time. But if I take the drive out of the computer and replace the SONY with it then it burns at 6.0x and when it spins up to 8.0x it actually sounds like it's spinning up, but the data transfer rate drops off and the device buffer fluctuates between 5% and like 90%. Average write speed is like 2.3x, and the drive buffer continually fills and drains(basically it appears as if buffer underrruns would occur without buffer underrun protection), however my software buffer which is 128MB stays at 100%. I know the computer can handle the data as I have a quad processor 2.8Ghz P4 XEON, 1.5GB of ram, and no other programs are running in the background. I've tried everything I can think of to make it work, and I know that firewire can handle the bandwidth because i've burned 2 different DVDs at the same time from the firewire HD to 2 different burners(all firewire) at the same time with no problems. Anyone have any ideas of what could be wrong? I've tried using USB 2.0, but that doesn't fix it either. I upgraded the firmware to 1.03 on TDKs site, but that didn't help. Thanks in Advance!

BTW.. I use DVD Decrypter to burn the ISOs I have.

-The Nerd