nec 3520a speed problems

[snitzle_iii]

basically this drive has been good to me. last night i made a made a copy of teh ladies man. i used dvd shrink and it took about 35 min to encode i have a 1.4 with 256 rd ram. and then i think i took 10-15 to burn the dvd at 12x. today i went to try to back up catch me if you can, but the encoding said it would take an hour! I use nero drivespeed sometimes to lock iin teh speeds. i checked the rom speed and it was locked in at 5x although i set it to 12x. ive tried restarting and reload the program and enter another dvd, but its defintly locked at 5x. please help

thanks

[snitzle_iii]

probally the most critical piece i forgot to mention im making backups for godfather 1,2,3 and i guess they are quite old...so the ripping at 5x makes scence, but when i try to burn godfather 1,2,3 it is still locked at 5x, but if i burn other media i can change it to whatever. it just seems strange becasue its off my harddrive so it should be at a faster rate right?

[snitzle_iii]

bump please

[normcar]

Are you sure you have DMA set properly for your IDE controllers, because you should have sub 8 min burns. I get about 8:30 min at 8x using my Benq 1620 drive. You should also ensure that you have 80 pin IDE ribbons, instead of 40 pin.

I would also upgrade to 512 MB RAM. 256MB is low, you may be swapping components in memory to disk. Also shut down antivirus or other running programs.

[chas0039]

I would agree with normcar. Your constaints are your memory, speed of processor, and hard drive. It sounds as though your NEC is doing as well as it can with all the limitations. Also Drive Speed will not increase the speed of your drive without hacked firmware and then it is still limited to 8X, as I recall. It sets the speed of the read, not the burn. Your burning software sets the burn speed and is limited by the media type. The 3520 is a superb burner but a poor ripper and reader.