Why is it taking over 90 minutes to burn dvds?

Somebody save me from throwing my computer against a wall. I have a system that I use for dvd duplication. It has a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard, with an AMD Core 6400+ (64-bit) processor running at 3.21GHz. The OS is XP Home. I have 4 gigabytes of Crucial RAM installed. I have (4) Samsung SH-S223l SATA dvd burners installed, and a 500GB IDE Western Digital hard drive.

When I burn one or two dvds simultaneously, burn times are normal, about 6-7 minutes at 12x. When I attempt to burn 4 discs at the same time, it takes over 90 minutes. This shouldn't be. It's very frustrating. I have tried versions 6, 7, and 9 of Nero Burning Rom. Nothing changes. Can anyone shed some light on this?

I am willing to bet your poor little processor cant handle that much data in that many threads simultaneously. You are losing a lot of time to your CPU switching tasks, your HDD may also not be able to sustain the necessary 60MB/s transfer rate necessary to feed all 4 drives.

+1 to hunter315, but for that matter, is 4 gb of memory enough? once you get a better CPU and a faster HDD, you may still find a bottleneck with your memory.

(2 DVDs at 7 min) x2 = 4 DVDs in 14 min (give or take)

14 minutes sure is a lot faster than 90 min

well at ~16 megabytes/sec for 12X thats expecting 64MB/SEC for all 4, That can be done(most drives reach that speed, even older ones), but you have to take into consideration that latency of the drive having to jump from place to place(since its reading 4 different ISOs or sets of files) to feed all burners. I am sure you are just causing all burners to wait between seeks for others.

2(since 1 drive handles 2, i guess 2 should handle 4) or more hard drives may help this.

All in all, just go 2 at once.

EDIT, did not see that hunter315 already covered this. my bad