Good day! New to this forum but not new to IMGBURN - been using it for years.
I tend to burn a lot of ISO files to discs and so my setup is a bit more complicated than most. This has worked perfectly until very recently and I was hoping someone might have some insight.
Until recently, here was the setup. I have two workstations here, both members of a Windows domain, that I regularly burn from:
Machine 1:
Windows Vista Ultimate
4 burners, 4 honkin' big hard drives
Gigabit ethernet
Machine 2:
Windows XP Pro
2 burners, just one local drive
Gigabit ethernet
The ISO's I burn are usually stored on the honkin' big hard drives on Machine 1. I am regularly able to burn discs at 20X speed (using, generally, either Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim discs). As both machines have plenty of RAM, I set the buffer size at 512MB.
As you'd expect, burning on burners on Machine 1 is never an issue as everything is local. Where you might expect I'd have trouble is with Machine 2, but really, that hasn't been much of an issue. It can take 20-30 seconds to fill that 512MB buffer at the beginning of the burner, because the ISO is on Machine 1 and has to be read across the gigabit network, but otherwise, Machine 2 can burn discs at full speed.
Over this past weekend, I upgraded Machine 1 from Windows Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional (actually a complete reinstall - I swapped out the C: drive with a new SSD drive and installed to that). And now I'm having issues with network speed (but, it should be noted, *ONLY* with IMGBURN - more on that later). NOTHING else changed.
Now, when I tell Machine 2 to burn an ISO stored on Machine 1, it takes about a minute or so to fill up that 512MB buffer, and I find that burning faster than 16X is hit-and-miss. OK, that's not TOO bad, but it's odd.
For testing, I copied an ISO over to Machine 2 and then tried burning it from Machine 1. Epic fail. Well, not fail entirely, but the process took about 40 minutes. It takes about 4 minutes for Machine 1 to fill up its 512MB buffer while getting the data from Machine 2, and then can barely keep up with 2X burn speed.
Here's the part that confuses me: moving the ISO files back and forth between the two machines, using Windows Explorer, goes very fast, usually around 90 seconds to copy a full 4.7GB image either way. It's just IMGBURN itself that reads these ISO files slowly.
To further test this, I copied an ISO file over to Server 1, which is running Windows Server 2003 and is my file server. This is a performance box and, again, moving ISO files back and forth to it (either from Machine 1 or Machine 2) using Windows Explorer is very, very fast.
From Machine 2, if I then try to burn that image (the ISO is on Server 1, the burner is local), everything works GREAT. But from Machine 1 (the ISO is on Server 1, the burner is local), I again see tremendously slow read speeds on reading the ISO (3-4 minutes to fill the 512MB buffer), resulting in a disc burn that takes 30-40 minutes.
And yet if I go into Windows Explorer and manually copy that ISO from Server 1 to Machine 1, it goes like greased lightning.
So clearly I'm not having network issues. Something's different in this Windows 7 setup and I'm damned if I can figure out what it is. Has anyone else seen anything like this and/or have any advice for me? Does IMGBURN temporarily copy data it's reading from an ISO file onto the C: drive somewhere? Because that might explain it - my SSD drive has awesome read speeds but abysmal write speeds. (Swap file is on D:, a regular SATA drive.)