Burning on the fly....

Here's the setup

PC 1: Celeron 800, 192 MB Ram, ATA 66 controller, Sony 8x4x32 burner, Generic 40x cd-rom. Nero 5.5 burner software. Shuttle EV18 mboard

PC 2: T-bird 1.2 (266 FSB), 512 MB Ram, ATA 100 controller, Creative 8x4x32, Delta 52x cd-rom Nero 5.5 burner software. IWill KD266 mboard

Both machines have XP Professional. Both burners are masters on the secondary controller, cd-roms are slaves on the secondary controller.

Two my knowledge both burners have a 2 MB buffer. Neither one has buffer underrun protection.

PC1 burns on the fly with no problems at all. Dozens of disks, not one has failed yet.

PC2 will not burn on fly. Fails at 8x every time.

No additional processes running in background. Switching the arrangment of burner and cd-rom on secondary controller has no effect.

I'm begining to think that my Creative burner is just a piece of garbage, or that my Delta (sounds like a helicopter taking off becuase the door vibrates) cd-rom isn't delivering the througput it advertises. ??

Any suggestions?

Gary

 

Try using this Nero CD Speed utility, to see if the relationship between drives are the same for both machines.

 

cd burnig

I'm amazed not one coaster on PC-1? The ide controler can only handle info to one drive at a time & you are burning on the "fly" with both source & destination drives on same secondary ide controler? I would put the source on as slave with hard drive or put burner on as slave with hard drive & cdrom as master on secondary master. Bet ya burn faster & with less errors

 

Thanks for your tips Rancher.

I've often pondered over the two schools of thought on CDR placement.

Put the two cd-roms on different cables to ensure better throughput but possibly slowing the response of the hard drive.

Or place them both on the same cable so as not to impeed the hard drive but run into possible problems when using them both at once.

I chose the later and to date I haven't had a coaster with the burner on PC-1. when burning on the fly. Of course, I leave the pc alone when it's burning - I'm not one to fiddle around on the pc while it's writing a cd, since neither drive has buffer underrun protection.

Interestingly retrieval of the part no. off my sony burner on PC-1 and a visit to their website reveals that it has a 4MB buffer not a 2MB as previously thought. So i'm sure that I'm running into the read/write limitation as you descirbed, Rancher, but it seems the extra capacity of the 4MB buffer is enough to handle it.

But thanks for the suggestions. I'm always interested to hear someone else's viewpoint on a subject - some times it takes a different set of eyes to provide the answer. Always glad to be part of this BB I've always found my fellow members to be very sincere, knowledgeable and helpful.

Gary

 

iceolated

Yer welcome! I'm learning the same way.
Last tip from the FWIW department, on pc2 w/2mb buffer, copy image to folder on hard drive & then burn back to cd. This would of course free the secondary ide of the "stop&go" routine that happens on the fly now. Could shave 3-5 min off burn time too