What is the bottleneck?

[pitsi]

I have a Plextor 12/10/32A CD-Writer, running on WinXP Pro. Here is my system specifications:

Athlon XP 1800+
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
Corsair 512MB PC3200 (Twin-LL)
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro
WD1200JB
Antec TruePower 430W

I am using this drive in PIO Mode 4, since anything else seems to give me a lot of troube (e.g. Nero can't work). My problem is this. When trying to create a CD using Clone CD (from an image file and not on-the-fly), the program uses by itself 8x recording speed. When using Nero and choosing 12x recording speed, the buffer always gets down to 20%, then it fills up to 99%, then it goes steadily down to 20% again, then it fills up etc. The CD is burned with no problems but it seems that my system has trouble sending data at 1.8 MBs/sec (12x). What's causing this? I am a gamer and I have no other problems with my system. My hard drive is running at UltraDMA 100 and I don't think that this is the problem. Could it be because I am using PIO Mode 4? Or maybe because my drive is quite old? Also could it be because the drive is connected on the secondary IDE channel as slave? (master is my DVD-ROM drive).

 

[boldgamer]

CD Burners rarely burn at maximum speed. The only times that it may burn at the maximum stated speed is when it is recording near the outer edges of the CD. During burnig on the outer edges of the CD the burner speeds up to maintain recording speed. think of it as an emblem in the middle of a football field and a football stadium. Picture yourself driving a car around the emblem and taking the time it took to complete one revolution around it. Now, in order for you to get around the stadium in the same amount of time you will have to move a lot faster to do so.

 

[phsstpok]

Make sure that your HD is in DMA mode.

You could try checking/reloading the ASPI layer. You'll find tools at the Ahead (Nero) site.

Are you getting any error messages when you try DMA mode? any message at all?

<b>56K, slow and steady does not win the race on internet!</b>

 

[JP5]

yes, yes, and no (unless you are using DVD drive at the same time)