Try disabling your antivirus before you burn and see if it goes faster. I've seen these on some peoples' machines take up over 60% of the CPU cycles, and certainly a lot of IDE bandwidth!

Do a HDD benchmark. Your drive is 24x, that means your burner should reach 24x by the END of the burning cycle, and 24x150k = 3.5MB, so I guess you should benchmark your hard disk but I'm pretty sure it could manage that.

Other than that it would be the bandwidth of the IDE channel. You should have your burner on a separate IDE channel, its own cable, to get the fastest performance.

But everything's sharing the PCI so unless you have something like HyperTransport or VIA's V-Link or something like that you won't be accelerating PCI transfers over DMA to their fullest potential because PCI is just 33MB/sec by itself.

So if you DO have V-Link or HyperTransport then that wouldn't be the limiting factor. But maybe DMA isn't enabled on your CD-R or something, you should check for that. If you have a VIA board you gotta get the 4-in-1 drivers.

Now if your drive is fragmented, the speed would be limited by seek time, and the r/w heads would be jumping around all over to read the full file, so in that case you should defragment. If you have any hard disk errors (run chkdsk/f/x/v and reboot) that might be slowing things down as cluster errors may prevent files from being read as fast as they should but only if you're trying to read damaged files...

I dunno what else it could be

> A CD burn at 5-6 minutes ain't bad, but being stuck with 2x DVD burning isn't
> fun. 30 minutes a pop is pretty time consuming.

That's how long it should take with a 2x burner :/ With a 24x burner it should take 5 minutes max, you could probably get a little more speed out of it it seems like. But not a huge difference.