Slow computer. Should I buy a Pioneer 106 or 107?

[gfrobe]

I have a PIII 800mhz laptop with 256 RAM and was wondering if this is enough juice to burn a DVD at 8x speed. The reason I ask is that I have an external CDRW that supposedly burns at 4X but the best I can get without errors is 2x. I've never been able to figure out if that's a problem with my computer or the burner itself.

Pioneer 106 is cheaper than a 107 so if I can't make full use of the 107 speed, I would opt for a 106.

Can anyone give me a bit of advice as to minimum requirements to burn at 8x.

Thanks.

[stackner]

well one thing i can tell you is that u wont be burning at 8x with your current system and possibly not even 4x.

my friend bought a burner and his system is a p4 1.6g and 256mb ram and it only burnt at 1x so i told him to buy himself some more ram 512mb MINIMUM and now he can burn at 4x. also the SLIGHT speed difference between 4x and 8x lets be totally honest unless you are gona be burning 100 dvds all in a row in one day or something then it doesnt matter. i have a 106 and 4x burn takes me about 15 mins. if u can burn 8x at bout half the time it is still not that much of a difference. 4x is fine for me to have a dvd in 15 mins that works also.

[andyp1]

Yes I would agree - more ram.
Also an NTFS file system .

[cd090580]

I have a PII 300 Mhz with 192 MB RAM and I can burn DVD at 4x without any problem (the cpu is only used at +/- 48 %).
I can't test at 8x because I can't find 8x disks

[gfrobe]

Thanks. I can see that 8x is probably out of the question for me but hopefully I'll be able to handle 4x. Unfortunately, I only have 2 memory slots on my laptop (each with 128 installed) so upgrading to 512mb would cost almost as much as the DVD drive.

[handyguy]

I used 2x on a 800mhz with 512M, Sony writer. But I noticed some dvd video disks would skip, so got a faster computer, no more skip.

[trossin]

800 milliHertz is damn slow. That's less than a clock cycle per second! My 600 MHz computer's clock runs 750 times faster than yours.

Do some math. People claim that at 4x it takes 15 minutes (1/4 hour) to burn a 4.7Gbyte DVD (1024*1024*1024*4.3). This ends out being a slow data rate of 4700 MBytes/15/60seconds or 5.2 Mbytes/sec. If the VIDEO_TS folder is already on your hard disk, I would guess any old piece of crap computer could move it to the DVD drive and keep up at 4x or even 8x. Remember that DMA should be used for disk copy so your CPU should be just sitting around polling or waiting for an interrupt to say the transfer completed.

[gfrobe]

Trossin, you've got me confused. How does your computer of 600mhz run faster than mine of 800mhz?

[andyp1]

m=milli M=Mega

so your mHz is millihertz and MHz = Megahertz

He's just joking

[redwudz]

gefrobe: What is your interface to your external drive? If it's USB, that may be your problem. As far as burning DVD's with your setup, I don't see why not. Encoding, yes, will be slow. If you were to use a PCMCIA Firewire interface you should be able to do it. Your existing memory is sufficient for burning. IMO USB is a poor choice for an interface to an external drive, especially from a laptop. A few people get it to work, a lot don't.

[gfrobe]

My CDRW drive is an external Iomega ZIP and it's only compatible with USB 1.0. But it's capable of 4x speed and I can only manage 2x without errors.

For my pending DVD writer, I have a Firewire PCMCIA card.

I don't plan on burning a large number of DVDs so as mentioned above, I don't necessarily need the 8x speed. That said, is there any other difference between the 106 and the 107?

Thanks again.

gfrobe

[tompika]

The DVR-106 is a damn good drive

[handyguy]

I tried a 2x disk on my Sony on both a 800mhz & a P4 2.4ghz & they did write at the same speed. decoding on the other hand, takes a lot lot longer on a 800mhz.