problem with burning at 4x speed

[magecarin]

Hi, I could use some help, I have 3 burners all are pioneer 105, I am trying to burn at 4x speed from HDD but the best I can get is 2x speed, I am using 4x ritek and 4x optodiscs, I have nero, could the problem be that the computer is kinda old ? PIII 866Mhz,384MB RAM ? I have absolutely no idea where can be the problem, thanks a lot for any help

[Redd]

I don't have a Pioneer, but are your burners capable of burning at 4X?
Do you need to flash the firmware? Might want to check what version firmware you have and check the Pioneer web site support to see if you need to upgrade.

Good luck

[magecarin]

well yes pioneer is capable 105 is capable of burning 4x speed and I have newest firmware from pioneer page 1.33 I think, how good computer do you need if you want to burn at SAME TIME 3 dvds at 4x speed on your computer ? does it depend on pc memory or speed of processor or speed of HDD or ... ? thx

[trialsofg]

I believe Nero has a setting for your burn speed. Check that first. Also, I have the same processor, but more RAM, so I don't believe that is the problem. The only other variable would be the video card, but that applies more to ripping, etc. I did notice a BIG difference in ripping, etc. speed when I went from a 32 meg card to a 64 meg one. Are you calculating the actual burn time or are you including your ripping and converting in your speed estimate?

[txpharoah]

Could be that your Nero is too old.

[magecarin]

I believe Nero has a setting for your burn speed. Check that first. Also, I have the same processor, but more RAM, so I don't believe that is the problem. The only other variable would be the video card, but that applies more to ripping, etc. I did notice a BIG difference in ripping, etc. speed when I went from a 32 meg card to a 64 meg one. Are you calculating the actual burn time or are you including your ripping and converting in your speed estimate?

as you said videocard is more related to the ripping and encoding the video rather then burning, I really have no idea what can possibly be the problem, speed in nero is of course set to 4x and it even shows 4x but burns only 2x ( nero is newest version 5.5.10.7 i think I am calculating only the burn time it takes 31 to 32 minutes/dvd which is too slow, the 4x dvd media are sometimes almost a double price as the regular 1x media (which I can due to firmware burn at 2x speed), but I would spend those money to be able to burn fast, do you think that if I buy new pc that it would solve my problem ? the computer is quite loaded considering that he is 2 years old I have there a lot of stuff, win 2000, win xp and hunderds of programs, also is not possible that the cause if the problem can be hardrive ? I think the speed of HDD is 7200rpm but he is old 2 years as well... thanx

[magecarin]

Could be that your Nero is too old.

nope, nero is newest version, I try recordnow and primo prassi just to make sure but I dont expect it to work

[anosis]

Just a few things to check...

Is your HD at least ATA66? If yes, is your operating system set to UDMA instead of PIO (device manager - HD controller). If no and your actually running a ATA33 HD that could be your bottleneck (33Mbits/s=4125kBytes/s and that is short of about 1MBtye/s for 4x).

Are you sure the 1.33 Firmware accurately recognizes the media you use as 4 speed? The none-hacked 1.33 may not allow you to burn off-brand media at 4x even if the media says it is capable of doing it.

Make sure you disable or exit any software that could possibly slow down your PC.

[disturbed1]

if you want to burn at SAME TIME 3 dvds at 4x speed on your computer ? does it depend on pc memory or speed of processor or speed of HDD or ... ? thx

To burn 3 DVDs at the same time at 4x would need a data throughput of over 16mb/s.

You would also need to have all drives set to master on their own IDE bus. Of course Nero would warn of the IDE master settings before letting you burn.

Make sure your harddrive is defragged, and on a different bus than the burners, DMA is turned on for all burners, and your hardrive. If it still doesn't work and your settings are correct (All drives on a different bus), then your hardrives aren't up to snuff.


But I'm a little confused, your specs say you have a 2.0 gig CPU, with an external Pioneer A05.

You are talking about a different system (the mentioned PIII 866) with 3 internal A05's right?

[Suave74]

Im having the same prob with my burner it will not burn at 4x I have a nec 1100a 4x burner I have 512 ddr ram 3.06 ghz p4. the media im using is tdk 4x in the 100 pack. I tried with nero and eazy cd 5 and all I get is 2.4x. its not my dma mode, thats set to ultra 5.. can any one help?

[letgoofmyears]

I'm currently using 2 pioneer 105s(I finally got rid of my SOTEC 104....yay). I'm using RecordNow Max to burn to both at the same time. I know(because I graduated preschool) that 2 is less than 3, but I have absolutely no problems, using Ritek 4x media. I don't know why the third should pose that big a problem. The only difference I can see are the specs of our systems.

Also, I didn't know that your video card had anything to do with ripping a dvd.

[magecarin]

Just a few things to check...

Is your HD at least ATA66? If yes, is your operating system set to UDMA instead of PIO (device manager - HD controller). If no and your actually running a ATA33 HD that could be your bottleneck (33Mbits/s=4125kBytes/s and that is short of about 1MBtye/s for 4x).

Are you sure the 1.33 Firmware accurately recognizes the media you use as 4 speed? The none-hacked 1.33 may not allow you to burn off-brand media at 4x even if the media says it is capable of doing it.

Make sure you disable or exit any software that could possibly slow down your PC.

the computer is old about 2 years but I believe he is ata66 (90% sure), how do I check it ? I tried to burn it in both win2000 and winxp, sometimes the win2000 even have problem to recognize the burners I have tried that recordnow and primoprassi and in win2000 it did not recognize any of the 3 burners, how do I check for that UDMA ?
The nero seem to recognize the 4x media correctly, when I put there 1x media it offer burn with only 1x speed, when i put there 4x media it offers 1x,2x and 4x speed, when I burn I do not run any other programs

[magecarin]

if you want to burn at SAME TIME 3 dvds at 4x speed on your computer ? does it depend on pc memory or speed of processor or speed of HDD or ... ? thx

To burn 3 DVDs at the same time at 4x would need a data throughput of over 16mb/s.

You would also need to have all drives set to master on their own IDE bus. Of course Nero would warn of the IDE master settings before letting you burn.

Make sure your harddrive is defragged, and on a different bus than the burners, DMA is turned on for all burners, and your hardrive. If it still doesn't work and your settings are correct (All drives on a different bus), then your hardrives aren't up to snuff.


But I'm a little confused, your specs say you have a 2.0 gig CPU, with an external Pioneer A05.

You are talking about a different system (the mentioned PIII 866) with 3 internal A05's right?

lets say I want to buy new computer, I need it primary for burning dvds, dont need it for games or anything else, what kind of pc should I get, I need also big HDD (at least 200Gb) to store dvd files on it, now to answer, I have Hdd set as master, 1st burner is set as slave then on other IDE bus I have 1 writer set as master and other as slave, I cant set them all on mastes it wont recognize them all and I have only 2 IDE buses to use
I do have 1 notebook which is 2ghz which I used before to burn with my 1 external pionneer (I have 4 burners total, 3 internal, 1 external ), so I was talking about different system before, I will defrag the hdd, thats good idea, i did not do defrag for long time, also how do I turn on DMA on drivers ? thx for help

[txpharoah]

Check your hard drive settings. (For WinNT/2K/XP: right-click on MyComputer-> Properties-> Hardware-> DeviceManager -> IDE-> Primary IDE channel -> Advanced Settings-> Current Transfer Mode) and (For Win95/98/ME: right-click on MyComputer-> Properties-> DeviceManager-> DiskDrives-> IDE-> Properties). Your system should be set on ULTRA DMA or DMA. Note: Some Ultra ATA cards (example: Promise card that comes with Western Digital drives) will not show DMA as an option, but the feature is turned on.

[magecarin]

Check your hard drive settings. (For WinNT/2K/XP: right-click on MyComputer-> Properties-> Hardware-> DeviceManager -> IDE-> Primary IDE channel -> Advanced Settings-> Current Transfer Mode) and (For Win95/98/ME: right-click on MyComputer-> Properties-> DeviceManager-> DiskDrives-> IDE-> Properties). Your system should be set on ULTRA DMA or DMA. Note: Some Ultra ATA cards (example: Promise card that comes with Western Digital drives) will not show DMA as an option, but the feature is turned on.

well, partially success, problem was with that DMA setting BUT, I am now able to burn at 4x speed which is ccol but only with 1 drive, when I try to burn with 2 drives simultaniously the speed drops so the 2 dvds burn in 30 minutes (not 15), any idea how to resolve this one and I would be the happiest person on planet ) thx

[Alan69]

Looking at Nero I don't see a way to burn to two drives at once, are you running two Neros? If so, and burning two different files remember there can be many milliseconds between getting from one to the other, with Windows background crap going on too, may be enough to stop it doing 4X on a slower system. My old K6-2 450 system could only do 8X CD 1X DVD for video, would make skips if done any faster. P3 900 is better but with two trying to run 4X DVD may be too much..

If two different files, then I don't see how to help, they're both reading fresh data.

If you're doing two of the same DVD, a big system memory cache of the HD data may let you do two. Set both Neros up to run, and start both at nearly the same time. As long as they stay reasonably close, the second Nero should read from the cached data of the first, and a large system cache will give more lattitude than the HD's buffer. Really might let you do three if having to zip around the HD surface is what's stopping the speed, should cut it back down to one file throughput on the HD side if they can stay within cache distance for the 20 minutes or so. Not sure if that's possible, or may need a hack or 3rd party cache program to get a big enough cache. 128 or 256 MB extra for cache should do it, doubt they'd get further out of sync than that, and old memory is cheap.

And do you have 3 IDE controllers? As someone said you need you HD, and the two or more burners all on their own seperate IDE bus. There's a lot of extra handshaking to changing IDE devices. If you need another controller, a caching IDE controller that can boot for the HD would keep the cache out of Window's hands. May even be cheap enough to get for an older system now..

Just some ideas, hard to tell without seeing the system.

Alan