exile183 Posted August 7, 2011 Share Posted August 7, 2011 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.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LIGHTNING UK! Posted August 7, 2011 Share Posted August 7, 2011 Try enabling the following... Tools -> Settings -> I/O -> Page 1 -> File I/O -> 'Reading - Always Use Buffered I/O' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exile183 Posted August 7, 2011 Author Share Posted August 7, 2011 Try enabling the following... Tools -> Settings -> I/O -> Page 1 -> File I/O -> 'Reading - Always Use Buffered I/O' Just tried it. Still slow as molasses. :-( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LIGHTNING UK! Posted August 8, 2011 Share Posted August 8, 2011 What network controllers are on those machines? If Realtek (probably the most common), have you been to the Realtek website and downloaded the most recent driver for them? ImgBurn is only using standard Windows APIs for the reading the file and it reads in chunks of 64KB. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exile183 Posted August 8, 2011 Author Share Posted August 8, 2011 What network controllers are on those machines? If Realtek (probably the most common), have you been to the Realtek website and downloaded the most recent driver for them? ImgBurn is only using standard Windows APIs for the reading the file and it reads in chunks of 64KB. Wow, you're good! That did indeed correct my problem! I had assumed (oops!) that since I could copy an ISO from the Server to Machine 1 using Windows Explorer at high speed, that there was nothing wrong with the networking side of things. Shows how much I know. :-) Here's some additional information on the case, in the hopes it helps the next person. "Machine 1" is a "generic" PC assembled by my local PC store, I have no idea what the motherboard used in it is, but as you guessed, it had what Windows identified as a "Realtek PCI GBE Family Controller" in it. When I installed Windows 7 (64-bit edition) this past weekend, Windows found a driver for it and installed it. I'm not sure if Windows update found another one or not. Anyways, at the end of the installation and Windows updates, I wound up with this driver version: 7.23.623.2010 As per your instructions I went to Realtek's website and downloaded and installed a new driver: 7.46.610.2011 After reboot, I find that not only has this resolved my issue with IMGBURN, but even Windows Explorer file copies from Server to Machine 1 are about 30% faster as well! Thank you *VERY* much for your help! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LIGHTNING UK! Posted August 8, 2011 Share Posted August 8, 2011 Cool, glad it's sorted. Just check it without forcing buffered reads (i.e. disable the setting I mentioned earlier again). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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