Solved: Very Slow DVD burn, Eventid 51 CdRom warnings

F

FUBARinSFO

5:12 PM 9/15/2006 lsz DVD slow burn problem notes

PROBLEM

Burning a data DVD takes ten times longer than it should. Data DVD
compilations that used to take 6 to 7 minutes now take 80-100 minutes.

Devices involved in this problem:

Promise Ultra133 TX2 (BIOS 2.20.0.15) ATA133 drive controller
Promise Ultra100 TX2 (BIOS 2.20.0.15) ATA100 drive controller
Plextor PX-760A 1.00 DVD writer
Plextor PX-716A 1.08 DVD writer

SYMPTOMS

Observing the drive lights during the burn process, the DVD light
alternates between active and ready, in alternate sync with the hard
disk drive activity light, indicating a write-stop cycle rather than a
continuous write process.

Testing of the burned DVD shows it to be perfectly good -- MD5 hash on
thousands of files computes without error, and read transfer test speed
curves with Nero 7 CD-DVD Speed Test and Plextools Pro 2.32a show
smooth monotonic increasing progression in speed from inside to outside
tracks at 5-12X CAV.

The main write buffer on Nero 7 appears to stay full, but the track
buffer may be emptying. When using Plextools Pro 2.32a to burn a DVD,
the program gives multiple warnings that the buffer is below 10% full,
but the main buffer remains full.

Simulating a DVD write with Nero 7 or Plextools shows no problem with
reading the data from the hard disk drive (20+ MB/s read speeds for
delivered data, 10+ MB/s for reading data from good reference data
DVDs).

Inspection of the System Event log shows multiple CDRoM memory mapped
paging errors (eventid 51, IO_WARNING_PAGING_FAILURE).


SOLUTION

The DVD burner was attached to a Promise ATA controller card. Moving
the DVD device to the motherboard IDE channel, or replacing the Promise
controller adapter with an Adaptec ASH-1233 ATA/133 controller
eliminated the problem.

DISCUSSION

The problem appears to be that the Promise ATA controller cards do not
handle the DVD burn process properly using DMA. Inspection of Nero 7
burn logs shows "DMA: off" in every problem case, whereas "DMA: on" for
the situations where the device is connected to the motherboard IDE
channel.

The problem appears to be independent of motherboard, chipset or
burning software. It may still be Plextor-specific, since I didn't
have any other DVD writers to test. And it may also be specific to
later operating systems like XP SP2 and Windows 2003 Server, since I
didn't test on Windows 2000 or earlier versions.

Platforms:
1. Tyan Tiger MPX S2466N-4M, Athlon MP 2000+ (single CPU
configuration), AMD 760 chipset, Windows 2003 Server SP1, Promise
Ultra133 TX2

2. Leadtek Winfast K7N18GN Pro 5.0, Nvidia chipset, Windows XP Pro SP2,
Promise Ultra100 TX2

Discussion with Promise tech support indicated that they would look
into this problem.

-- Roy Zider
 

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