Weird buffer underrun issue...

[Savant]

I've been wrestling with this issue for the last couple days, and I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this issue or has any ideas...

I recently added a new burner to my system, bring the total to 3. They are all Pioneer models. (103, 105, and 107)

After adding the 107 I was forced to stop using Prassi Primo DVD since it doesn't support the 107. I'm now using RecordNow 4.5 - and if I do a test burn with all three recorders, I get buffer underruns on the 103.

Now before you suggest the obvious (system overtaxed and such) I have already looked over all of it. CPU usage never goes higher than 15% and the drive with the files is defragmented.

However, what is really telling is one of my later tests. After trying various ways of connecting the 103 to my system, (both internal and external) I tried something different.

I created two jobs. One job with the 103 and one job with the 105/107. I started both jobs at the same time and ran them simultaneously. Lo and behold, no buffer underruns.

Does this make sense to anyone? If anything I would expect that two jobs would create a bigger load than one, and generate a buffer underrun for sure.

Has anyone run into this issue before?

Regards,

Savant

[Savant]

Further weirdness, I ran an overnight test of 5 test burns on each drive, running in two jobs. The 103 did the first 4 burn tests fine, then gave 11 bad burn tests, and gave the last burn fine.

There was nothing else running on the machine overnight, but I can't figure out why I don't get buffer underruns all the time.

Perplexing indeed...

Regards,

Savant

[tkamin]

Check to make sure your writer is still set to DMA. XP likes reseting it to PIO.

change your settings liek this:
Control Panel>System>Advanced>Device Manager>IDE controllers (Primary and Secondary)>Properties>Advanced Settings, DMA if available

[Savant]

Yeah I was checking that... The odd thing about that is when the system boots it shows the drive as PIO4, yet in XP it shows the current transfer mode as 'Multi-Word DMA2', which I have confirmed by watching the CPU usage. (if it was PIO there would be higher CPU usage) The other unaffected burners show up as 'Ultra DMA2'. (not sure about the difference between 'multi-word' and 'ultra' DMA2, but I do know that this is an early recorder and Multi-Word DMA2 was the best I ever got out of it, and I didn't have a problem until now.

Mind you, this will likely be a wildcard unless I can confirm the drive is actually set to that transfer mode. (any ideas on a utility that can confirm a transfer mode by actual data transferred and not by simply reporting what it sees in the registry?

Regards,

Savant