CPU Speed, Disk Queue, AHCI/IDE, Buffer Questions

[VirusZ]

Hi,

I have a number of questions please.

 

I build a burning home server with 3 LiteOn burners its Win7 x64Bit / RAM 8GB (has no background apps, nothing its freshly installed with drivers and ImgBurn, using Microsoft antivirus with excluded ISO files, HDDS with ISO's and ImgBurn.exe)

 

1. at max I run x3 instances of ImgBurn and burn on 3 DVD drives, I have an Athlon Dual-Core 4050E 2.1Ghz Low Power CPU on my old gaming mobo Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD3P

Is it recommended to get a better CPU? I was looking at Athlon Dual-Core 5600+ 2.8Ghz for 32$ or Phenom 8650 Tripple-Core 2.1Ghz for 40$

 

2. I have x5 1.T SATA 2 drives of same model (not raid, just AHCI), I did some write checking using Speed Commander and coping 8Gb file, i get about 90MB write speed on average.

So actual read speeds should be a bit higher, in theory this speed should be more then enough to burn 2 ISO files simultaneously from same HDD drive.

But nope, the Soft buffer depletes and then pauses the burn. Even when it verifies from same HDD, the verify can go down to x0.3 speed on one and x2 on another, regular verify speed is around X7 for DL media

Will higher Disk Queue setting solve this issue?

 

3. many people recommend IDE mode instead of AHCI for burners, AMD mobos can turn port 4/5 to IDE while keeping the rest as AHCI.

So i changed my 2 main burners to IDE, but the Hard Buffer is all over the place, on AHCI it was always at 100-99% never moving.

in IDE mode, its jumps like crazy usually it jumps between 50% to 100% but sometimes goes down, its all momentary but i see the burning speed decrease at this moments, not by much like 300K or so

 

4. Last question, is it worse to use larger soft buffer value then the default? Can it affect the disk quality of tested with Kprobe or compatible?

Is beneficial in any way to create a small (say 512Mb) RAMdrive just for the imgburn program?

Do i need a SWAP file for imgburn? Because I disabled it, 8Gb of ram is more then enough especially if I dont run anything else on the system also I installed 8GB fast ready boost drive

 

 

Many Thanks

[LIGHTNING UK!]

1. I doubt your CPU is the problem. Look at it in Task Manager, is it maxed out?

 

2. Hard disk sequential transfer rates are very different to their random access transfer rates. Stick to reading 1 image at a time from 1 phyiscal hdd if possible (sdd would be fine though).

 

The 'Average Disk Queue Length' has nothing to do with maintaining a full buffer. It controls the upper level on how busy the drives can be before ImgBurn resumes burning after buffer recovery has kicked in.

 

3. If your AHCI drivers are working ok (support all of the optical drive commands and don't mess up the error codes), you're fine to leave the controller set to AHCI mode. Mine is running in AHCI mode but it's an Intel controller.

 

4. It's only worse if you have no RAM to spare. Giving the program more will of course take it away from the OS and other apps that might benefit from it being available.

A RAM drive would only help if you copied the image to the RAM drive and burnt it from there.

If the drive has to stop and start burning all the time (due to the buffer being empty), that's when you might see the odd tiny spike on a KProbe scan. Burn quality is an internal drive thing so nothing you do outside of the drive (apart from things that change how the drive does stuff) will make any difference.

 

No, you don't need a swap file for ImgBurn. The OS likes to use one when it's running low on physical memory though and you need one in place for writing out the memory dump should you ever get a BSOD.