CD burner is very slow

[Jacob]

A month ago I bought a new DELL computer with 3.0 GHz Pentium 4, 800
bus, 512 MB memory. I tried both HP 9700 CD burner with 16x speed,
and IOMagic 8x dual DVD burner rated at 40x for CD reading and
burning. In both cases I could not get more than 7.5x CD copying
speed. I tried both copying from another DVD-reader (which is primary
device on secondary IDE), and from the CD copy on harddrive. No
difference in speed.
I'm using Windows XP Pro, Roxio Easy Media Creator 7. I tried three
different brands of blank CD rated at 48x, all with the same result.
IDE controller for IOMagic showed "Transfer mode: DMA if available",
and "Current Transfer Mode: PIO mode".
Dell support told me that that's as good as it gets, but I cannot
believe that 40x rated CD-burner is not capable to write more than
7.5x. What can I do to improve performance?

 

[Bob Knowlden]

My guess is that your IDE controller is stuck in PIO mode.

There are a variety of fixes here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472&Product=winxp

"IDE ATA and ATAPI Disks Use PIO Mode After Multiple Time-Out or CRC Errors
Occur"

The simplest method is to uninstall the IDE controller from Device Manager
and let XP re-install it.

Good luck.

Bob Knowlden

Address munged. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

 

[Nelson Lee]

A month ago I bought a new DELL computer with 3.0 GHz Pentium 4, 800
bus, 512 MB memory. I tried both HP 9700 CD burner with 16x speed,
and IOMagic 8x dual DVD burner rated at 40x for CD reading and
burning. In both cases I could not get more than 7.5x CD copying
speed. I tried both copying from another DVD-reader (which is primary
device on secondary IDE), and from the CD copy on harddrive. No
difference in speed.
I'm using Windows XP Pro, Roxio Easy Media Creator 7. I tried three
different brands of blank CD rated at 48x, all with the same result.
IDE controller for IOMagic showed "Transfer mode: DMA if available",
and "Current Transfer Mode: PIO mode".
Dell support told me that that's as good as it gets, but I cannot
believe that 40x rated CD-burner is not capable to write more than
7.5x. What can I do to improve performance?

Need to get it out of PIO mode and into DMA mode to get faster performance.
Try going into the BIOS and checking the settings of the device attached to
the secondary master.

 

[Graham Mayor]

As others have indicated the speed is crippled by traffic jams on the IDE
bus thanks to PIO mode. See http://www.gmayor.com/cd_writer_udma_mode.htm

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Two things. You definetly need to get into DMA mode, but lastly, you
can't expect to copy on the fly at 40x. Some data takes longer to rip,
so you are limited to as fast as you can rip the CD for burning

Check the BIOS as stated for changing the transfer mode.

Nathan McNulty

 

[Mike Powers]

Another problem may be the speed of your CD media. You might also try
making an image on disk and then burn from that to see if your speed
reduction is primarily a function of read, write or some combination.

 

[Jacob]

Thank you very much everybody. The BIOS was indicating that there is
no secondary IDE device. As soon as I changed it to AUTO, the DMA
mode appeared on for the IDE drive (Ultra mode 2). I was able to copy
70-minutes long audio CD for 2'55", which is very good speed. Again,
thank you very much everybody!!!