Buffer underrun on a (decent) solid state drive

[Billco]

I've been successfully using ImgBurn for a few years now (and its previous incarnation for several more). I'd like to think I know my way around it, but on my latest system I've been experiencing buffer issues in a consistent and predictable fashion. In my not-so-humble opinion, as an expert user, something is really messed up.

 

My PC is, by all standards, pretty flippin' high end. Core i7 950, 24gb Ram, two OCZ Vertex 60gb SSDs, high-end GPU, Windows 7 Ultimate x64... you get the picture. On this beast, I get (software) buffer underruns while burning any type of disc, from a 600mb CD to an 8.5gb dual-layer DVD. The only way I can get a clean burn without underruns is if I put the image on the 2nd SSD and make sure there is no other activity on that drive the entire burn.

 

What happens if I do anything on the drive, is the buffer will start depleting and never recover. If I move some files around, copy/unrar or anything else, the buffer depletes. When the task is finished, the buffer does not refill. It almost seems like the buffer can only refill at the exact same speed as it's burning. It does this regardless of burn speed, be it 16x DVD or 4x CD, the weirdness remains, e.g. if the buffer drops to 75%, that's where it will stay until the burn finishes. I've tried relaxing the "average disk queue length" parameter to 5.0, with no improvement.

 

I've tried this on a similar machine with a fancier SSD (Intel X25-M), and saw the same behavior. What drive me really batty is I get better results if I put the file on another PC, map a drive letter to it and burn across the network. It seems as though ImgBurn's buffer recovery algo is confused by the SSD's sub-msec random access speed. Other burning apps such as Nero and the Windows 7 ISO burner work just fine on these machines, as does K3B in Linux.

 

Any ideas on how I can work around this ? Without installing a spinning hard drive, that is.

 

Cheers

-Bill

[mmalves]

Try enabling the Reading - Always Use Buffered I/O option in Tools -> Settings -> I/O tab.