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Building ISOs


geezer

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Wow, I guess I should have been utilizing two different HD for building ISOs all along. :fool:

 

I wonder why the Shrink ISO build is quite a bit faster (more throughput) than Imgburn using a single HD (left), but slower when using two different drives?

 

I really like the improvements to ImgBurn. Great work LUK!

 

post-2784-1154891920_thumb.jpg

Edited by geezer
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what chipset is your mainboard based on also what make of hard drives you using

 

It is an Abit NForce4 MB (AN8-SLI) with an AMD X2 4200 CPU

2 GB OCZ RAM

2 74GB Raptors

Using the latest 6.86 drivers nForce drivers.

Edited by geezer
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had a feeling it was nforce 3 or 4 and raptors.

 

You should maybe try and install one time without the nforce ide driver, see if you, like me get even better performance IE Write rate.

 

Though mine is 63,776 i ain't got raptors, shame they are gig limited and dear, i like the look of the x raptor but price kills me, could have a TB for same price as 2

Edited by dontasciime
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I learned about using 2 different hard drives to really speed things up when I was using Amiga PCs for years. With Windows it's a requirement no matter what kind of hardware or version OS you use, hahaha! Even putting your swap (VMemory) on a different drive than C helps a lot as well as installing software to another drive all together. Just a few times to speed up winDOZE. ;)

 

ImgBurn rocks! Time to donate!

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had a feeling it was nforce 3 or 4 and raptors.

 

You should maybe try and install one time without the nforce ide driver, see if you, like me get even better performance IE Write rate.

 

Though mine is 63,776 i ain't got raptors, shame they are gig limited and dear, i like the look of the x raptor but price kills me, could have a TB for same price as 2

 

I only yesterday upgraded to 6.86 and installed the IDE driver this time. I had been running v6.70 without it (using the XP driver) but had some noticable "lag" during intensive disc I/O. The IDE driver seems to have cured the lag, but then again, it may be a bit slower. I didn't perform this test with the native XP drivers. How much difference did you find?

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DVDShrink may use different buffering internally, and also on the 'ReadFile' API too.

 

I don't tell the 'ReadFile' API to NOT use buffering, perhaps that's slowing things down for you when you use the same hdd for reading / writing.

 

If you tell that API to not use buffering you have to read certain amount of data at a time. Because ImgBurn has to be able to read all sort/sizes of files, that makes things more complicated - hence I didn't bother with it.

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Thanks for the explaination LUK! I see your point.

 

Since I took the plunge yesterday by installing the v6.86 MB drivers including the IDE driver (been running with the native driver and v6.70 for about 8 months), I'm a little paranoid about what it may "break".

 

I made an image before the "upgrade", just in case...

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Well, as an experiment, I rolled back the IDE drivers to native XP and built ISO's with the same sources.

 

Quite a bit of difference with ImgBurn using a single drive for source/output. Also a significant difference with Shrink and 2 HD.

 

Hmmm interesting. Maybe I'll just use the native XP drivers afterall!

 

post-2784-1154891984_thumb.jpg

Edited by geezer
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I would as the nvidia ide and most of the nvidia drivers suck imo, full of bugs, you,ll get sata drive appearing as removable sometimes, fail a warm reset, bios/post hang, then onto the lan driver, disabling lan(Ie on a temp basis) on some nforce driver will reboot ya machine.

 

Thank heavens for Ghost.

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When doing these speed tests, you are making sure fragmentation isn't a factor yeah?

 

The more random accessing the hdd has to do, the slower the transfer rate will be.

 

I'd be amazed if drivers really made THAT much difference. After all, the slowest part (by far) is the hdd itself.

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Hi LUK!

 

The sources for all the ISO builds were the same. The drives were defragged at this point. My AV was also disabled during the builds. An ISO was generated on each drive using ImgBurn (1 HD then 2HD) and then deleted. Then repeated with Shrink.

 

But, I did not defrag between each run or randomize the order of the ISO builds. So, not truly scientific... But interesting.

Edited by geezer
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Somebody needed to ask. I guess I should have included more details.

 

BTW, the single HD testing was reading/writing my data/storage drive (D:).

The 2 HD testing was reading the D: drive and writing the ISO to my system drive (C:). The system drive also contains the swap file...

 

Just for fun, I defragged both each run and repeated the native driver test. The highest fragmentation reported by Perfect Disc after each run was 14 fragments on the System drive and 4 on the D: drive.

 

Beware of aborting an ISO generation with ImgBurn. When I let it delete the incomplete file (I let it do this on two different occasions) it deleted my entire folder structure up to the root level not just the .iso file.

 

post-2784-1154896826_thumb.jpg

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Did you up the buffer to 100mb for ImgBurn too? Maybe a bigger buffer would help in these situation - I notice DVDShrink was using almost 100mb in the first screenshot ;)

 

Oh and regarding the folder deletion stuff, that's how DVD Dec always used to work and nobody said anything then!

 

Since the release of ImgBurn, 2 people have pointed it out (it scared them!) so I've made it prompt for deleting empty folders too - it wouldn't delete them if they weren't empty.

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No, the default buffer size was used for all of them.

Increasing the buffer is a good idea. :doh:

If I decide to try the nvidia IDE driver again, I'll increase it and see what happens (I assume you mean the Read Buffer Size on the Build tab under Settings).

 

When my three level folder structure disappeared along with the incomplete iso, I was a bit troubled as well! Thanks for the info.

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Sorry for your loss (of the folder structure) !

Once I upload the new one, I'm sure it won't happen again ;)

 

No problem. It wasn't THAT much work to get it back :typing:

 

I did it the second time only to confirm that it really happened the first time.

 

Keeping a lookout for the update...

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