Problems with dual burners

[sirshafty]

Hey, I have two dvd burners and I've been trying to burn two dvds at the same time. Problem is, the burning speed on each burner drops to really low speeds whenever I try to use both burners at once. I've been using dual-instances of dvddecrypter, each set to a different affinity. When I'm only using one burner (either one), it burns at normal speeds. The burners are different models and are on the same IDE controller, but I've been told that that shouldn't matter. The images I'm burning are all stored on the same hard drive partition, and the hard drive is far from full, so I doubt the hard drive is the bottleneck. The firmware on both burners is up to date. Does anyone have any idea why the burners would be having trouble operating at the same time? They don't seem to have a problem ripping at the same time, only burning. And they seem to be able to burn cds at the same time with no issue.

Here are my specs:

Motherboard: ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
CPU: Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz running @ 3.42GHz
RAM: 2gigs Dual Channel DDR2 Team Xtreem PC6400
Hard Drive: Seagate 320GB 16MB cache 7200RPM
Heatsink: Big Typhoon
Case: Ultra Aluminus
Power: Ultra 550W Modular Powersupply
Graphics: ASUS ATI X1950 Pro
Optical: BenQ DW1620 & Pioneer DVR-111D
Moniter: LG 20.1" Widescreen L204WT

[classfour]

I've had more luck with alcohol 120%. Still, due to the IDE interface, and the amount of data that it can transport: I usually set all burners to 4X (3 burners, 2 16X, 1 12X), or 6X (2 - 16X), to ensure a good burn. The goal is not to burn as fast as one can, the goal is to finish a good (or two good) burn.

[Krispy Kritter]

When most people refer to using multiple burners, they are using the burning software to read an image and write that image to multiple drives. In your case, it sounds like you are reading and burning different images. So you are trying to move twice the amount of data. I would definetly say that you HD could be the bottleneck, as well as overall slowness caused by the IDE Bus.

The easiest way to tell would be by watching your buffers. If the buffers stay full, then the slowness is when data is being moved to the drives. If the buffers are low/empty, then the slowness is in retrieving the data from the HD.

[sirshafty]

Thanks for the suggestions. I've been out of the country for a couple weeks, and I just got back now. I haven't had the chance to test my burners again yet, but I believe that the buffers fluctuate all over the place when I'm burning two at a time. I'm sure my hard drive doesn't like reading two images at once, but it is a 7200RPM Sata300 with a 16mb buffer, and both images are on the same partition, which has very little fragmentation. Since writing optical data is, as far as I know, much slower than reading hard drive data, I wouldn't expect my hard drive to be the bottleneck.

The secondary IDE controller on my motherboard is actually a JMicron Primary EIDE controller. I didn't think that this would support a dvd burner, since it's not supposed to support ATAPI. But, people have been telling me that they have their dvd burner connected to their JMicron controller, so I think I'll try putting one on there. Maybe it'll work better if the burners are on seperate controllers.

[oldandinthe way]

It would certainly burn better with two different controllers. It would also burn better with two different hard drives.

You might also look at increasing the system cache used for the hard drive.

And of course you are subject to all of those background cpu eaters which plague single burn users, AV, Antispyware, MSindex etc etc.

[sirshafty]

Yeah, that's true... though I keep my comp running pretty clean. It takes less than 5 seconds to go from logging on to windows to being fully booted up, and when my comp is idle, each core averages between 0 and 1% usage, so I don't think there's too much background stuff using up resources. Burning dvd's barely seems to use any resources anyway.

[smitbret]

I burnt two or three images at the same time to individual burners but always from individual hard drives. I've tried burning more than one image from a single drive before and from what I see and hear, it seems that the HDD can't mechanically keep up. I can hear the read heads scrambling to keep up, moving from image A to image B and back and forth. Probably about the worst thing you can do to a hard drive next to dropping or overheating. Separate drives=flawless full speed burns, although I also burn to individual IDE channels, too. I've never put more than one optical drive on an IDE channel.
-Brett

[sirshafty]

I hope that the problem isn't my harddrive, cuz I don't really want to buy a second one right now. And when I do, I plan on putting them in RAID 0, so that won't solve the problem anyway. The other problem is that to burn the images from seperate drives means I need to plan ahead and make sure that I rip the images that I plan to burn at the same time to different locations.

One reason that I don't think that the hard drive is the problem is that when I rip two different images from my burners at the same time, the hard drive has no problem keeping up.

[oldandinthe way]

Its not a function of how clean your drive is, it is a function of how much head movement you are causing on a single drive. The head will not have to move back and forth from two places on the disk.

Increasing cache will enable greater read ahead and therefore also increase disk efficiency.

But two hard drives is the way to go. And waiting until you can afford a RAID raid may not give you the performance benefit that two independant drives will.

[sirshafty]

I was originally going to put a raptor in for my OS drive and use my current HD for storage, but I decided it wasn't worth the small boost in performance considering how expensive raptors are. Then I wanted to go RAID 0+1, but figured it was overkill and I couldn't afford it anyway. I also considered getting two drives, but figured that I had no real need for 640GB of hard drive space. I could easily fill it, but only by being lazy. So I stuck with one drive.

I'm a little annoyed that when I built this computer two months ago, I couldn't find a SATA burner in Canada, and now there are tons of them. I might just buy a couple of them now and give my PATA ones away. At least going SATA would eliminate any issue with IDE controllers.

[Krispy Kritter]

I don't believe your PATA burners are the issue. The bottleneck in your scenario is your single hardware...and you have already verified this by the fact the buffer isn't staying at 100%. If your HD was keeping up, then the burn buffer would be 100%.

As it is right now, it most likely isn't saving you anytime by burning more than one image at a time.

As a side note, you may want to use dvdinfo pro or nero cd speed to verify the data on your discs. Some drives (mostly older models) have a habit of corrupting the discs whenever "burn safe" or whatever technology is repeatedly used to protect a disc. (I have this problem with an older Lite-On drive...works great until the buffer hits zero once...then I have a coaster).

[sirshafty]

My older drive (the BENQ) hasn't burnt one coaster in recent memory... and I've burnt a lot of dvd's with it. The Pioneer, which is new, has burnt some coasters already. I think the problem with it is that it doesn't support FujiFilm dvds, which I've always used, since my BENQ worked fine with them. So, I ordered a second Seagate drive (exact same as the current one) as well as a few hundred Taiyo Yuden TY-02's. So, hopefully the second drive combined with the high-quality dvds solves my problem.

[budz]

My older drive (the BENQ) hasn't burnt one coaster in recent memory... and I've burnt a lot of dvd's with it. The Pioneer, which is new, has burnt some coasters already. I think the problem with it is that it doesn't support FujiFilm dvds, which I've always used, since my BENQ worked fine with them. So, I ordered a second Seagate drive (exact same as the current one) as well as a few hundred Taiyo Yuden TY-02's. So, hopefully the second drive combined with the high-quality dvds solves my problem.

There's your problem the FUJIFILM discs media id is RITEK which is crappy media. Nothing wrong with your dvd burners. I'm sure you'll have better results with the TY discs.