> 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!
>
Checked, disabled, no interference.

> 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.
>
Done, checked out fine. About 50MB/s.

> 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.
>
Checked. There are two IDE slots on my mobo. One hooks up both my HDs and the other is for the optical alone.

> 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.
>
Ok, how do i check if that's enabled or not? ( my mobo is a VIA btw )

> 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.
>
Kinda lost me there. How do i check the DMA (edit, ok, i checked, it's enabled as multi-word(?) DMA mode 2) and what 4 in 1 drivers are you talking about?

> 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...
>
Nah, i always keep my HDs perfectly defragged. I use the slower one for downloads and the faster one for storage and burning. The

>
> > 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.
>
Yeah, if i can get this speed-lock issue in check the max i'll get is 4x anyways. My DVDR was 8x, probably gonna get a 16x for the exchange, but I can't seem to find any media around here over 4x. :-\


Gives us a kiss precious.