Burning Problem, Write speed is varying up/down (like a yoyo!)

[Mr Bitey]

Howdy All,

 

My Pioneer 111L 8.29 has started having trouble burning discs and im unsure where the problem is.

 

The drive has been working fine for ~6 months, flashed as a 111L 8.29 (Bufallo) with a mediacode speed edit to remove the ripping speed restriction (nothing else modified).

 

The disc burns 'ok' in that there are no burn errors, verifies ok and shows a good quality score in nero cd dvd speed (in itself) and kprobe2 (on a liteon dvdrom). However during the burning process, the drive slows down the speeds up, then down/up (you'll see in the graph) in IMGBURN the device buffer remains ~94-100 and the ram buffer remains at 100%.

 

The burner is on a secondary IDE controller (on the motherboard) and is the only drive connected (its a master) on a 80 wire cable. BIOS is set to Max UDMA, windows device manager says its using Ultra DMA (mode 4 from memory, ive also deleted all the IDE controllers and windows has redetected them to double-check).

 

Ive reinstalled IMGBURN, gone back to default settings and tried changing from elbycdio to SPTI with no difference found (same problem).

 

Ive used TYG03 and RITEKF1 media (same problem) - exmaples of both are below. I also see a similar problem using Nero Cd dvd speed (create disc) (graph included)

 

Below is a Log, and link to the dvdinfopro graph and a nero graph.

 

For the record, ive also tried dropping the burn speed to 8X - same issue is present.

 

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!!! before I start swapping drives or getting out the windows xp cd for a re-install.

 

LOG:

I 19:28:41 ImgBurn Version 2.3.2.0 started!

I 19:28:41 Microsoft Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600 : Service Pack 2)

I 19:28:41 Total Physical Memory: 1,048,044 KB - Available: 691,248 KB

I 19:28:41 Initialising SPTI...

I 19:28:41 Searching for SCSI / ATAPI devices...

I 19:29:00 Found 1 DVD-ROM and 1 DVD

Edited July 17, 2007 by Mr Bitey

[Mr Bitey]

Thanks LIGHTNING UK!

 

Cheers,

Bitey

[LIGHTNING UK!]

That's just the drive performing WOPC - 100% normal for Pioneer drives.

 

There's really no need for the 256mb buffer (unless for testing purposes), it just takes RAM away from Windows. 40MB is fine.