Plextor 716A DMA setting problem (noob)

[damnitbeavis]

Hello folx,

I just got a plextor 716a dvd-r drive, and I love it. It burns really fast, reads quickly, but I have this one nagging little problem. I can get the drive to be set on UDMA, but it only goes to UDMA3, and won't do the UDMA4 that I've read it can. My hard drive is set to UDMA5. I have the HDD on ide1, the dvdr on ide2, and even tried switching them, still HDD was UDMA5, DVDR UDMA3. I'm using 80 conductor cables everywhere.

System:
Soyo sy-p4s-645dx dragon ultra
pentium 4 2.4 ghz
768mb ram
windows xp pro sp2

If it won't be easy to fix, does this difference between UDMA3 and UDMA4 even make a noticable difference in DVD writing/reading performance? Should I just give up, and stop wasting my time?

Thanks for any help,
-Eric

[cfitz]

Should I just give up, and stop wasting my time?

Yes, you should give up and stop wasting your time. UDMA3, at 44.4 MB/s is sufficient for 16x DVD transfers (roughly 22 MB/s). You don't need UDMA4's 66.7 MB/s

cfitz

[damnitbeavis]

I appreciate the help, now I'm going to go to sleep

-Eric

[cfitz]

You're welcome. I hope you had a good night's rest.

cfitz

[damnitbeavis]

Whenever I burn a disk on my 716a, the drive writes fine for a while, then ithe device buffer rises and falls. I still end up with about 8x write speed on my media (fujifilm 8x DVD+R YUDEN000 T02), but I'm wondering if there's some problem with my drive, my system, or just my media? What do you think?

When I did a writing speed test, the graph started out at about 7X, then went up to 10x in a pretty straight line.

Next, it started oscillating between 10X and 7X between 1.5GB and ~3GB
Then, it oscillated between 10X and 5X until the end of the disc.

I'd post the image here, but I don't think I could figure out how to do that.

Any ideas?
-Eric[/img]