I recently bought a new samsung dvd burner, its rated at 16x speed and the media im using is at 8x speed. The problem is that this drive is burning at the speed of smell, its taking it an hour to burn an entire dvd.

Im also using nero 6. What setttings could possibly be doing this, or is it the hardware itself doing this?

You should state what burner you are using as well as what media. You should also state what you are trying to burn.. data, movie, what?

A few things to consider:

Your burner is limited by the write speed of the media. Also, different media take different times to burn. For instance, dual-layer and re-writable media take longer to burn than, say, a single layer DVD-R. DVD movies will take longer to burn than data because of menus and DVD structure, chapters, etc.

Also, it is possible that you did not select the proper burning speed in Nero. If it is set to 4x or 2x, then yes it would take a lot longer to burn.

Another thing people don't often consider is file fragmentation. If the file(s) you are trying to burn are heavily fragmented on your hard drive, then they will take a lot longer to burn. This also increases the risk of creating a coaster 8O Defrag!

Ah sorry, ill give you some more detail.

Media
Drive

I am trying to burn a full disk of data at 8X. This should theoretically only take 7 minutes, but it consistently is taking an hour.

Im gonna try just seeing what rebooting does, as the machine has only been powered on once after the drive was put in the pc.

When you buy off brand it's going to be a shot in the dark. I have had some burn fine and other not. Try another burner to test the media.

There was one bad review for it, i suppose i could have gotten unlucky.

I defragged my harddrive as said, im gonna test it again tomorrow.

I dont know if this can be of any help. But when im burning my hard drive light is always on, my pc slows down a ton, and on the buffer level of the drive in nero, its flipping out.

Its going 0 to 13 to 100 and then back down to zero.

My pc specs are

Athlon xp 3000+
1 gb ram
40 gb WD 5400 rpm master
40 gb Maxtor 5400rpm slave.

Anyone have an idea of why this thing is still burning so slow?

If ure buffer is going nuts...thats the problem....

Look into your hard drives...at 5400 rpms they are not going to be varry fast and they will have high seek times....so defraging will help allot...but the drives may have problems helping you feel the burner fast enough....

I have a similar burner as well less than 10 min for a single layer disc...(i will get the exact time next time i burn..)
I only problem i have with it is that it will only burn some 48x(CD-rw) media @ 24. Samsung says this is due to the existance of 24x media with the same tag or something....

EDIT
come to think of it...also do check for better media....as the drive may be slowing down and speeding to to try to burn(adapt) the media....

Okay, I suspect that your old 5400RPM drives are a bottleneck. The burner has to wait for data from the slow drives. You may have better times if you decrease the burn speed to 4x. This should get the buffer under control.

However, I really think you should upgrade to a 7200RPM hard drive. Here's a good option. And here's one thats better price per GB.

I use TDK DVD-R media. Really good quality. Out of 100 I usually get 3-4 coasters. TDK can be expensive, but I did find 50 packs for $15 once. Oh, and with a 7200RPM drive you should easily be able to burn at 16x. For me that's a full disc in about 5 and a half minutes.

Also, while burning I wouldn't run many programs. Try disabling your antivirus, etc. Don't do much beyond web browsing during the burn.

The only thing that immediately springs to mind is to check that all the drives (both optical and hard disks) are working properly in ultra DMA mode. You should be able to verify this under system properties in the control centre. I've seen Windows XP stick things in PIO mode before, a serious performance killer.

I can't imagine a 5400rpm drive making a huge amount of difference, especially if it is defragged.

Hope it is something nice and simple like that.

Karl

i have a similar drive from samsung, and i recorded almost an entire DVD-RW (around 4GB) in around 20 minutes at linux, so your drive is definetly slow. 7 minutes is a bit optimistic for a full disc. Do you run any other application while burning the dvd?

Im working on getting a new 7200 rpm hard drive. My old 250 gig is being kinda funny, so im gonna sell it and get a new one. If anyone wants a huge hard drive for cheap, message me.

Im only running mcafee 10 while im burning, i tried the media at 4X and the problem persisted. Nero wont go any lower than 4X. Im gonna try to see if the same thing happens when I burn a cd. Im also going to try firmware updates, if there are any.

Maybe this has something to do with when I put the drive in, i heard a noise like something was rolling around in the drive.

Edit :

I burned a cd at 48X with media that worked fine on my old burner, and with the same hard drive im working out. The cache continued to flip out, 3 minutes isnt a long time, but the cache was still flipping out.

Maybe its time to RMA?

i think it is time to RMA... after all it amost looks like the buffer is messed....cd's burn much slower than a DVD....so it will not affect the time as much....

just for a test....

@ 8x 8min and 6 seconds for 4391 megs
buffer only fell now and then to 89 percent.


Even on my laptop with a 4200rmp drive that does not happen...(usb to ide to test)

Its not a bad drive...as long as you get one that works...

Wow, this is incredibly weird. The dvd drive works perfectly fine on my dads pc, which has a athlon 1.3ghz, 512 mb ram, and a 160gb hd.

Im going to try a different power supply and see if this fixes the problem, i used to have problems with my big 250 gig, and maybe this is the same thing.

Hi,

I have the same problem with the buffer jumping in and out but my drive will not burn faster than 1.1x

I have no idea why, my configuration (see below) could handle P2P, unpacking a file, IE7 running and burning a data DVD at 16x, about 6-7 mins total. It just did that a month ago, I can't recall installing anything that made it change. Now it doesn't even matter if I shut down Kaspersky IS 7 and have nothing running, never faster than 1.1x
have no tasks eating up ressources...I can't find anything unusual running either.

I read all posts and thought my drives but I used a complete/access defrag with O&O and run a RAID system which worked fine before and is still very fast except for burning.
All else does still work fast (P2P, IE7 and you name it running) just the burning. So what the H... is this???

HELP !!!

system:
Win XP Pro SP2
nForce 4 Ultra chipset RAID with 2x WD1600YS Raid Edition - 160GB 7200rpm 16MB cache each SATA300 (thats why I don't think drives)
Pentium D805 @ 3.36 Ghz
2 GB 667 Mhz RAM KIT
Samsung SH-182M (newest firmware...worked fine before...)
Nero 8 and ImgBurn....both do the same with Buffer

THANKS TO ANYONE!!!!

Cheap, no-name