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When I burn 16x Verbatim 4.7 gig DVD-R media with my new SOHW-1673s (JS07 Firmware) using Nero Express (v6.6.0.13), it is taking about 15 mins to burn a disc (at 16x speed, as verified by Nero during and after burn).

What am I doing wrong? I thought it would be twice as fast. It is connected via UDMA-4. I am using the latest firmware. I have a 2.80 processor and 1 gig RAM.

Any ideas?

Check the Device Manager and your BIOS to make sure that it really is using UDMA and that DMA is enabled.

You may want to activate the option to show the true burning speed in Nero- see this post for quick info. That will tell you if the drive is really using 16x or dropping down to a lower speed for some reason. The burning time corresponds to 4x.

For DMA, see How to enable DMA in Windows XP (with pictures).

G

Thanks Ian and MediumRare,

I have two Primary IDE channels, one for my SATA drive and one for my primary IDE slot. I have my HDD in the SATA one and my Lite-On drive in the other (I have a secondary also, where my other Lite-On 52327S resides). In my BIOS, the DVD-RW appears in IDE 1 and the HDD in IDE 3.

Anyway, it appears as UDMA 4, so I think I'm good there.

I have enabled the real speed feature in Nero, and the burning usually starts at 8x and works its way up to 15x with this Verbatim 16x DVD-R media. For what that's worth.

I may be getting buffer underruns, but I don't know how to tell exactly or what to do about them. I don't know if the fact that the drive has only 2MB buffer matters or not (I have one gig regular memory and a 2.80 processor).

Any other ideas?

*Follow Up*

I defragged and everything improved dramatically. Back to around 7.5 mins. I also made sure almost nothing was running in the background.

By the way, any suggestions for programs to identify what is running in the background (other than Task Manager)? In my setup this impacts my burn speed significantly.

Thanks. That reminds me that I need to defrag.

Do you regularly scan for Adware and Spyware? These types can really slow down your computer.

opie wrote:By the way, any suggestions for programs to identify what is running in the background (other than Task Manager)? In my setup this impacts my burn speed significantly.

Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel
http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
it's not exactly what you asked for, but it tells you what programs run themselves automatically at startup, and most programs that run in the background launch themselves at startup, so it's still helpful for that.
Spybot-S&D can tell you this info too (Tools -> System Startup)
http://www.spybot.info/

What ever happened to good old msconfig?

nothing happened to it.
but there are more user friendly apps to do the same thing.

i especially like Mike Lin's program.