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I've been having problems getting my SM348b to burn cds at high speeds without encountering emptied buffers, justlink pauses, etc... it seems that it burns just fine at 16x but when I go to 24x or 32x the system can't keep up.

This is very odd because I run a 2.53ghz P4 with 512mb Corsair XMS2700 and a 80GB WD800JB. When I burn at high speeds the hard disk drive light is on constantly, like the disk drive is being accessed heavily. The computer itself will slow down to the point where you can't do anything, i.e. move windows, type in AIM, etc until the burn is finished.

I do, however, have a TDK 40/12/48x USB2 writer that has no problems writing to high speeds.

Any ideas as to what might be causing this oddity with the SM348b?

d.b.

Comp Specs:
Shuttle SS51G
Samsung SM-348B
512MB Corsair XMS2700 (set in BIOS for 333mhz)
WD800JB 7200 RPM HDD
SB Audigy
ATI Radeon 8500 128MB
2.53GHZ P4

Sounds like you don't have DMA enabled on the Samsung. Read these:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=7625
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=6645

cfitz

I did check on the DMA status and the SM348B is running at UDMA 2 (ATA 33) and the WD800JB is running at UDMA 5 (ATA100). DMA is enabled for both drives. I checked that first... this is baffling me.

When I get home tonight I'm going to put my other SM348b in an external firewire case and see if it burns at high speeds without problems. I'll let you guys know.

d.b.

Hooked up my second SM348B to an external FireWire case. Burned perfectly at 48x with almost no HDD activity. Tried the internal SM348B again; couldn't burn at 24x without encountering problems--Nero reported that buffer underrun was avoided 16 times.

Tried some of the suggestions on the DMA threads. Uninstalled the secondary IDE controller and the primary IDE controller and restarted. Windows re-detected and re-installed them upon bootup. Tried burning again. Same problem.

Decided to roll back the SiS IDE controller to the stock WinXP SIS IDE controller. Uninstalled the secondary IDE controller and the primary IDE controller again. Restarted. Upon bootup and another restart, tried to use the internal SM348B at 48x. Burn was successful w/ only 1 avoidance of buffer underrun. HDD activity, while lower than before, is still vigorous--compared with a blip here and there while using the FireWire bus. However, burning at high speeds w/ the internal SM348B is now feasible.

Is it just the nature of the IDE bus to use a higher CPU overhead/access the HDD more? I read somewhere that FireWire is cpu-independent, but I get the same results w/ a 40x burner on the USB2 bus--very low cpu/hdd usage.

What are your thoughts?

d.b.

Our thoughts are that SIS chipset for IDE busmastering suck.

SIS features are impressive on the paper, but when it comes to performance and compatibility issues, you really should go with Intel platform, especially if your CPU is Pentium 4.