DVD Burning
 

My first attempts at DVD burning seem to be rather slow. The DVD-R drive is a Sony badged Lite-On capable of burning at 8x, but seems to be achieving about 10% of that at best, ie 0.75x, using the pre-installed Sonic software on my 6 month old Dell. Loads of free hard drive space, 512mb RAM, decent (not Celeron) processor.

The source DVD is in the D drive, but perhaps it would be faster copying the source material to the C (hard) and copying/burning from there?

Are you using 8x media?

I'm assuming here that you've copying disk to disk and not disk to hard disk to disk?

My assumption is that I'm copying from the D (DVD read) to the E (DVD-RW) drive, without going through the C drive. That's the impression that the copying utility gave me. I could copy the content to the C drive, and then use that as a source for the E drive. Which should be faster?

The media says 8x on the disc.

You "should" be copying from disk to disk as you rightly assume, but you never know.

For all my copying needs I use Nero, one of the best out there.

Second that plug for Nero! You can get the latest (V7) suite quite cheaply off eBay and it will do a load more than just copy, if you want it to.

I use nero too, or sonic plus others, and I always do disk to HDD to disk never disk to disk, it is considered that disk to disk is not the best way to do it. Don't know the in's and out's of why though. Reduces errors and things I believe.

Are the disks you are writing to actually compatible with the drive? there is normally a list on the manufacturers website or in a manual.

It may be that you are using a new brand of disk that is not known by the drive, normally a firmware update with new compatability can help.