Problems with Cendyne/Pioneer 105/A05 Drive

[skeive]

Hey All,

I recently purchased the Cendyne drive and installed it in a desktop pc. I am consistently getting less than a 1x write speed on it with whatever media I try using, and with various software packages as well. If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this problem I would be grateful. Here is the pertinent info on what I tried and what my hardware/software is.

I had tried several things to narrow down the problem with out any luck. I tried switching the position on the IDE channels ( from IDE channel 1 to 2, from Slave to Master ). I tried uninstalling the IDE channels and DMA controller in the device manager to get them to re-install. I tried switching to PIO mode. No luck.

I purchased a firewire enclosure and installed the drive in it. Going through a firewire connection I get the same problem. I plugged the firewire enclosure into my laptop pc, and am able to burn through the drive at full speed without any problems so I know that there isn't a problem with the drives hardware/firmware. I also know that the firewire enclosure is working perfectly.

My desktop machine is a Pentium 4 - 1.3 Ghz machine with an Intel motherboard, and 384 MB of RAM (800Mhz RDRam ) running Windows XP. It's got plenty of hard drive space free ( 28 Gb or so ) and I ran defrag on it several times after seeing the problem for the first time. I am not getting high cpu utilization under task manager ( either system or kernel ), and I am sitting with only 128mb or virtual memmory used ( about 200mb of physical memmory free ). My laptop is running similar software, and is a Pentium 4 - 2.1 Ghz machine with 512 MB of RAM. Obviously the laptop is faster, but as far as I know the desktop should be plenty to do basic dvd backups.

The only odd thing I can see while a disk is being written is that the burn light on the disk goes off for a couple of seconds every now and then during the burn process. This isn't happening when the drive is connected to my laptop. The buffer appears to be fine, keeping 95% filled throughout the burn process.

If anyone has any suggestions I would be eternally grateful.

Thanks,

Skeive
Purveyor of the Twisted Point

[Coopervid]

Please provide the type of media you are using. If this turns to be out to be 1x media times in the range of 1 hour for a complete disk is just normal. You have to get media that burns at 2x (30min) or 4x (15min) to achieve faster burning. No way to burn 4x on slow media!!! Different to what you might be used to from CD burners.

[skeive]

I am pretty sure that it isn't a media or expectation problem. I am using 1x media and am expecting 1x speeds. On my laptop 1x media burns a full dvd in a little less than 1 hour. With the Cendyne drive on my desktop pc it is taking around 2 hours 25 minutes for the corresponding burn cycle. I am also getting a lot of erros in the process. I plug the same Cendyne drive into the laptop and burn the same dvd from the same software and it takes around 55 minutes using the same DVD-R media ( Ritek media in this case ).

I have used Ritek DVD-R, Verbatim DVD-R, and Memorex DVD-RW. All media should burn at 1x on the Cendyne drive, though the Ritek is rated at 2x if you have a compatible drive. By default the Cendyne is not.

I have been burning DVDXCopy backups on the laptop ( which has a Toshiba SD-R6012 DVD-RW drive ) using the previously mentioned media types for about 3 months now, so am familiar with how long a 1x burn should take. This drive isn't even close to normal 1x burn speed on the desktop. This drive seems to act completely normal when hooked up to the laptop.

Thanks,

Skeive
Purveyor of the Twisted Point

[Coopervid]

Impossible to diagnose w/o access to your machine...

You should probably try to do a complete re-install or add a clean install on a seperate partition with PartitionMagic or so...

Something is slowing your desktop down considerably and it's almost a wonder that the burn process finishes at all w/o creating coasters.

[skeive]

Lol, who said I wasn't creating a few coasters?

Any other suggestions besides doing a format/reinstall on the comp?

Thanks,

Skeive
Purveyor of the Twisted Point

[crowdx38]

Go to device manager and uninstall your ide drivers,,, then reboor,, it will redetect the drives and the ide channels. If you are still getting under runs etc.. ( the light going off is the burn proof as far as I know) then you might check if you have a virus scanner checking as you are burning.
The DVD drive does throw a lot of data through the ide channels and also you may have a slow drive in there also. I have asome older drives which are quite big but suck in performance stakes giving only around 3mb read from them.
Hope these ideas help
Patrick

[Joe328]

Go into properties. IDE channels to see if DMA is enabled. It makes a whole shitload of difference. Even in ripping a dvd. 1hr compared to 15 mins.

Joe328

[skeive]

I had already tried removing the ide channels from the device manager without success. The drive was operating in Ultra DMA Mode 2. I tried several configurations on the ide ribbons, with one having only the DVD drive on the second ide channel so would presume it didn't have a lot of competition for the channels resources.

I don't have virus scan running constantly so I don't think that was it. I have screensaver and power save modes turned off so don't expect they would cause a problem.

I may try going through my task manager and killing most everything to see if that helps....

Thanks,

Skeive
Purveyor of the Twisted Point

[crowdx38]

Try downloading SiSoft Sandra and check the transfer rate of the hard drive, you may just have a slow drive, how old is the hard drive ?? 5400rpm or 7200 rpm ??
Patrick

[Vejita-sama]

Are you sure that you don't have your software configured to confirm burn/ test burn, etc?

[skeive]

Thanks for the suggestions,

I would expect a slow harddrive to show up as a problem with buffer underflow which doesn't seem to be present.

I downloaded Sandra and checked it out to be sure. Sandra reports the drive index as 16,860 kbs with buffered read of 84 MB/s and 24 MB/s sequential read. I believe at 1x burn speed the dvd drive only writes about 2 KB/s so would think that even using the sequential read number I should be fine. Am I missing something here?

The drive is a Maxtor 96147H6 formatted FAT32. Maxtor reports it as a 5400 rpm ULTRA ATA/100 drive with 2 MB SDRAM Cache and 9 ms seek time. This seems like pretty serviceable figures to me but I could be convinced otherwise.

Primarily using DVDXCopy for my testing and it doesn't have any confirm burn/test burn settings. It pretty much just assumes all is well unless the hardware screams at it.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Skeive
Purveyor of the Twisted Point

[skeive]

Thanks for all the suggestions all. I wanted to give you an update. I am crossing my fingers as I say this, but I seem to have "fixed" the problem. I basically went on a search and destroy mission within the task manager and killed absolutely everything that could be killed. I do not install much in the way of resident software, but evidently something was causing a problem as the drive seems to be working well now.

I find it odd that none of the programs were reporting any cpu utilization while I burned, but one of them was apperently causing a conflict. That's windows for you.

Thanks again,

Skeive
Purveyor of the Twisted Point

[crowdx38]

Very glad to hear it, the Pioneer is a great drive, had worked flawless for me since I got it about 6 weeks ago, only glitch was some bad verbatum disks I bought (visual mark on the back of 4 out of 15 spindle). Apart from that it has worked great. I always try to verify disks either with Nero or PrimoDVD
Patrick

[simonko]

skeive,

Put the drive on IDE 0, or IDE 1. Use 80 pin IDE cable.

Make sure DMA is enabled in bios and OS.

Turn off all un-needed software, ie. virus protection & screensaver.

ScanDisk and Defrag.

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