Waiting for hard disk activity to reach threshold level...

[i228]

I have an external hard drive running to my PC via a USB cable. It's not the fastest setup but it works. For 2 years now everything's been running great and I haven't had a problem burning DVDs at 16x. Recently for no apartment reason my DVDs are taking longer to burn... from 5mins to 15mins. I constantly get the error "Waiting for hard disk activity to reach threshold level..." then "Waiting for buffers to recover" this seems to be the cause of the sudden slow down. When I burn from another hard drive the burn only takes about 5mins. I have read the DMA FAQ however since I'm running my HDDs to my computer via USB will this even have an effect? If not, does anyone have a different solution or maybe an idea to find out whats causing DVDs to burn slow from one HDD but not another one? Thanks in advance!

[cornholio7]

maybe defrag your hdd's , i wouldn't be burning anything at 16x and definately not on usb, try at 8x after defrag and see if you get better consistency

[chewy]

from time to time I try to refresh my data drives where I have written large amounts that frequently change and often gets too full, I have noticed they get very badly fragmented

 

In the worst cases I have to burn off everything I can or transfer to another drive and even reformat the drive

 

Some conversion programs are especially bad about fragmenting dvd data sets

 

To understand this better check with defrag analysis, I did this drive about a month ago