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I recently used my Liteon LTR48246S to make a duplicate of an original disc, as I dont like to use my originals and prefer to use the copies for safety issues.

Now during the burn I always choose the option to save to HDD first then transfer from HDD to CD-RW, so data from the CD would be transfered from the DVD ROM (Pioneer DVD 106) to HDD, then from the HDD to the burner. The process takes a bit longer than doing a copy direct from the CD, but I beleive this method gives you a far better copy and burn.

Anyhow the process from the DVD ROM to the HDD when ok, but when the burn started the buffer underun went haywire, i.e crazy. The light kept going yellow and at some stages the buffer underun indicator dropped below 40%, I've never seen a buffer underun going as mad as this one. I was also burning at 40X, but this should not be the problem, as I've done burns at 40x before and never had this problem.

Now the other thing is that I have an USB external portable HDD attached to this desktop as well, and when the light on this drive turns orange it means that activity is happening, i.e its either sending or receiving data. I did notice the light go orange while the DVD ROM was trying to write to the HDD, but instead of writing to my internal HDD it was writing to the external USB one, strange but true. The same thing happened also when the burner was performing the burn. So I think that this is the reason why the buffer underun kicked in on the Liteon, waiting for more data from the USB external drive. Obviously the data transfer rate from the USB to the burner is slightly slower than that of the internal IDE drive.

Also when I go to have a look into my USB external drive, I get a file that says Nero Temp, obviously the temp files that the DVD is writing to. So instead of the data being saved on my internal HDD, it's saved on the USB external drive.

I also decided to perform the same burn on my BenQ at 32x, and its performance was far quicker than that of my Liteon, BTW my BenQ is in my server but no USB drives attached.

Can someone here pls help me to solve my problem.

Is your USB HDD on a USB 2 port or a USB 1.1 port? If it's on a USB 1.1 port, you won't be able to burn faster than 4x from it.

In Nero (I'm assuming you're using Nero), you can select which drive to use to store the temporary files, so you should be able to select your internal HDD.

Also, make sure DMA is enabled for all internal optical drives and hard drives in your system. See the CDRLabs FAQ Forum for instructions on enabling DMA.

Ok my USB HDD is on a USB 1.1 port.

Yes I'm using Nero but I cant seem to locate in Nero where to tell the software to store my Temp files, i.e to use my internal HDD not the USB one like it's currently doing.

I have enabled DMA in all my drives.

But like I said my main concern here is telling Nero to write to my internal HDD not the USB one, but just cant seem to locate it anywhere.

In Nero 5.5, you can select the hard drive to be used on the "Image" tab of the "New Compilation" box when you select "CD Copy".

Albinoni,

You can also set the Nero cache path at File | Preferences | Cache.