dino167 Posted November 23, 2006 Posted November 23, 2006 Hello - I've tried searching for this first but didn't see a topic on this so here goes... I run ImgBurn just fine and seem to get best results for my DVD players burning at 8x on my Sony dru-710a. These usually take about 8 minutes if I recall. Now all of the DVDs I've made for my kids are the movies only - no extras, no menus, so they can get them to play without help. I've saved the .iso files on DVDs so that I can make new copies as the old ones get scratched or broken. Copying the .iso from a DVD to my HD takes about 10 minutes so I decided to try adding an older DVD-rom drive to burn direct without transfering the .iso first, but the burn ends up taking about 25 minutes - longer than the old way. My question is would anything help make this faster? The reading DVD-rom is 16x, I have 1Gb of memory, and a 3.0Ghz Intel chip. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Shamus_McFartfinger Posted November 23, 2006 Posted November 23, 2006 It depends. It could be that your source and destination drives share an IDE channel which creates a data bottleneck. For this reason, your HD should be on a separate channel (connected to a different ribbon cable) to your DVD drive. This is what I'd check first. It could be that your DVD drive has slipped back into PIO mode. This can happen if your drive has trouble reading a disk. There's basically 2 modes in which your drive communicates with your PC - PIO and DMA. DMA allows for much faster access speeds. An undocumented feature of WinXP (and Win2K) is that if a drive drops back into PIO mode in an attempt to read bad media, it can often stay like that. Even worse, if you check the DMA settings of your drive it can report that all is well and that DMA is enabled. The simplest fix is to open the Device Manager and uninstall both IDE controllers and then reboot. Windows will then reinstall the drivers in DMA mode at startup.
dino167 Posted November 23, 2006 Author Posted November 23, 2006 Shamus - you were right on about the IDE channels, both DVD drives were on the same one so I corrected that. At first it seemed like that was going to work perfectly, but after the speed was just about ramped up the buffers dropped to 0% and the log showed the familiar: W 00:43:24 Waiting for hard disk activity to reach threshold level... I 00:43:25 Writing Image... W 00:43:47 Waiting for buffers to recover... W 00:43:57 Waiting for hard disk activity to reach threshold level... I 00:43:58 Writing Image... W 00:44:20 Waiting for buffers to recover... that I've seen posted. But since I'm going from DVD to DVD is there really a problem with the HD activity? Could it be the way I have everything connected now? The burner is alone on the secondary channel and the primary channel has the HD as master and the reading DVD-rom as slave. Perhaps switching the HD & DVD-rom could help? I also uninstalled the IDE controllers to make sure I'm on DMA. Any thoughts? Thanks for the help.
Shamus_McFartfinger Posted November 23, 2006 Posted November 23, 2006 Shamus - you were right on about the IDE channels, both DVD drives were on the same one so I corrected that. At first it seemed like that was going to work perfectly, but after the speed was just about ramped up the buffers dropped to 0% and the log showed the familiar: Unfortunately, you've hit upon a problem that isn't uncommon. The trouble is that because you have more than 2 drives (and I'm guessing no SATA drives), no matter how you have them configured you are always going to have a problem with at least one of them. If your HD has its own channel and your DVD drives share a channel , you will obviously have a problem moving data between the 2 DVD drives. The reverse is also true. If one DVD has its own channel and a DVD and HD share a channel, you will have problems moving data between the drives on the single channel. That's what this "Waiting for hard disk activity to reach threshold level" is telling you. Without adding more hardware I don't see a solution. Looking at your original question, you might want to invest in an external HD to store your ISO images instead of burning them onto disk for storage. The technology is dirt cheap these days, you'll save money on media and they'll always be accessible and easy to find. If your PC supports USB2 then the drive will also be blindingly quick. 30MB/sec easily.
dino167 Posted November 23, 2006 Author Posted November 23, 2006 Thanks for the reply. I've come to the same conclusion - I already have one external to hold my music so I'll probably just pick up another or just drop a bigger HD (or two) in the computer itself. It is amazing on how cheap they are these days. Thanks again for the help.
dontasciime Posted November 23, 2006 Posted November 23, 2006 (edited) IDE 0 [primary] 1st hd 80 wire cable [master] IDE 0 [secondary] dvd-reader same 80 wire as Hd [slave] IDE 1 [primary] dvd writer 80 wire [master] IDE 1 [secondary] 2nd hd same 80 wire as dvd writer [slave] tx between dvd rom and writer is fastest you can get hd tx 2 hd fastest you can get Any Iso you have to write to DVD store on Hd 1 Any compression on video files store on hd 1 process onto hd 2 Any reading of files use dvd writer to read (hopefully no riplock on writer) store files on Hd1 [edit] actually depends on layers, read -5 to hd 1 from dvd writer, read -9 to hd 2 from your dvd reader. That would be how i would set it up to do task your after, unless i missed something Edited November 23, 2006 by dontasciime
Shamus_McFartfinger Posted November 23, 2006 Posted November 23, 2006 Thanks for the reply. I've come to the same conclusion - I already have one external to hold my music so I'll probably just pick up another or just drop a bigger HD (or two) in the computer itself. It is amazing on how cheap they are these days. Sounds like a top plan. You can never have too much HD space. Thanks again for the help. You're welcome.
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