CD recording speeds

[Cornish Jack]

I do a bit of amateur recording on MD and edit to CD for the choir members - say 10-12 copies per concert.
Have access to two desktops to do this, one is an AMD Athlon 64 with 1 Gig of RAM and goes fairly well. T'other is a Packard Bell with a Celeron and half a Gig.
I normally do the copying from the master disk on the PB since it is usually less used. Copying is 'on the fly' using Nero (5 on the PB and 6 on the Athlon). Was forced to use the Athlon recently and was astounded to find that after 27 minutes it had only completed 67% of the copy!!!:eek: Reverted to the PB and the same task completed in just over 6 minutes. CDs being used are 52X, so decided to do some timing trials at various write speeds. Quite surprised by the results ...
At 16x - 5m 29s
At 32x - 6m 24s
At 48x - 6m 59s ....... :confused: :confused: :confused:
These are all from the same master, same program, same 52x media, copies made in succession.
Anyone like to hazard a guess as to why faster is slower??

[BOAC]

Buffer over-run slowing it up?

[frostbite]

Are you sure the slower one is not set to verify, and the faster one not?

[Saab Dastard]

In the Athlon, have you checked which buses the CD-ROM and the CD-RW are on, and that DMA is enabled etc.?

IIRC, you get best performance when the 2 CD drives are on different buses (not always feasible!), both set to DMA and fastest mode possible.

[spannersatcx]

2 things that produce/cause bad recordings on CD
1/ Copying on the Fly
2/ Writing at more than 8X speed.

[Cornish Jack]

Thank you to all for the replies.
Spanners - I've been doing all of these copies 'on the fly' and, so far, have only had two or three 'coasters' out of about 200 copies. I would have put those down to poor media rather than too fast burning but I'm quite happy with that sort of success ratio. I would normally burn at 16x with 52x media and the buffering seems to be adequate. I'm still puzzled though, as to why burning at 48x takes longer than burning at 16x, on the same machine, using identical conditions/media.

[BALIX]

Cornish

I had the same problem as you for ages before I was informed how to fix it. It was all down to the DMA settings as Saab says. Right click My Computer, then Hardware, then Device Manager. Find IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and expand it. Right click either the primary or secondary IDE Channel, then Properties. Click the Advanced Settings tab and make sure that the Transfer Mode is set to 'DMA if available'.

If you know which channel your burner is on it helps but setting both primary and secondary channels to DMA should cause no problems as long as whatever is connected to the other channel isn't very old.

[Cornish Jack]

Balix
Thank you for that. I've just done as you suggested and each of the drives are set for 'DMA if available'. I may well have to go back to yet another re-install but I'll wait for yet another XP 'difficulty' first!!:mad:

[BALIX]

Cornish

Oh well, it was worth a try. Good luck in your search for a solution.

By the way, I've never really subscribed to the theory that slow speeds are best when it comes to burning as the burners themselves are likely to be optimised for writing at higher speeds. I've never had much problem burning CDs at 40X and DVDs and 8X. I do, however, always rip CDs to the hard drive first and burn them from there. It also pays to make sure the PC is doing nothing else whilst it is performing the burn.