Burning two disks simultaneously with Nero, but speed suffers greatly.

[nick13]

Athlon 64 X2 4800, 2 GB memory. I have two NEC 3550’s burners with the same firmware.

When using them separately, they burn with speed X16 perfectly! But when burning same movie to both of them simultaneously with Nero, speed goes way under X8!

So basically I can burn two movies using ONE burner faster than using both of them simultaneously!

The question is; why would anyone spends money for a second burner in this case and is there any way to improve the situation? (Except buying stand alone duplicator).

Thanks in advance guys.

[CrayonEater]

That's how it is. I've noticed it myself, and the drives aren't the problem (and one of my drives is also a 3550a, but it was a problem before I got it too.) Multi-burning is a convenience so you don't have to change out discs, but no one said it would be faster.

[guns1inger]

Are they both on the same IDE channel, or reading form the same HDD ?

[nick13]

Are they both on the same IDE channel, or reading form the same HDD ?

Answers to both questions are "YES"

Since it's the *same* movie I'm burning, it's definitely resides on same HDD. Thanks.

[oldandinthe way]

Lots of potential bottlenecks in this case which can reduce your performance.

[jagabo]

You're bandwidth limited by all the I/O. The option made more sense with 2.4x or 4x writers.

[nick13]

Thanks guys for your help. As far as I understand unfortunately there is no way to improve the situation with out buying DVD Duplicator.

If I burn the same movie from same HDD with two burners simultaneously it always will be bottleneck and burn even slower than with one burner.

Thanks.

[redwudz]

If your hard drive with the files is on a different channel than both of your burners and each burner is on a separate channel, that's about optimum. But that may require adding a separate PCI IDE controller. And there is no guarantee that it will be a lot faster. Even with dual core, unless the OS and the software can be set up to use the dual cores separately for burning procedures, maybe no improvement.

In most systems I have seen, running two burners at once is not usually faster than burning two disks, one after the other. It may be easier, though.

[nick13]

Thanks redwudz.

[KBeee]

<snip>
But that may require adding a separate PCI IDE controller. And there is no guarantee that it will be a lot faster. Even with dual core, unless the OS and the software can be set up to use the dual cores separately for burning procedures, maybe no improvement.

In most systems I have seen, running two burners at once is not usually faster than burning two disks, one after the other. It may be easier, though.

But be aware that many PCI IDE controllers cannot be used with DVD burners (ATAPI), only HDD's. Adaptec and Highpoint no longer support ATAPI on their PCI IDE controllers.

[anonjon]

Would using SATA DVD burners remove a bottleneck? I've wondered about that for a while now.

[KBeee]

I doubt it.
Some SATA DVD burners are only IDE with a SATA-IDE interface kludged onto them.
IDE is nowhere near stressed by CD/DVD burning rates, so the theoretical "improvement" afforded by SATA probably wouldn't be noticed.

[smitbret]

I frequently burn to 3 Burners simultaneously with Nero, all at 8x and don't see any performance hit. Two are connected on separate IDE channels and the third is a firewire enclosure. I think a lot of it depends on bandwidth; what channel the source drive is in relation to the burners and to make sure the burners are all on separate channels.
-Brett