832s/1693s both slow burns on NF7s 2...

Okay folks, I've been at this problem for MONTHS now and have literally tried everything I and others can think of... short of a fresh-reinstall, which I don't want to do b/c I would like to solve this problem and log it for my personal collection of How-to's/Error logs etc.... Here's the link to my trials on this and failed experiments trying to figure it all out.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=142954

Basically I couldn't get my 832s nor brand new 1693S to burn past a 4/5x avg on DVD+R's with multiple media (8x Ri's, TY's, Mem's and Verbatims). Just about every burn results in this "roller-coaster" effect of memory buffer and speed increases and decreases until the end of the burn.

If anyone can add something to potentially help solve this stupid speed bottle neck, PLEASE post! THanks

Is that a NF/NF2 board?
If you're using Nvidia drivers---scrap them and go back to the normal Microsoft drivers. Tons of people have massive problems with burning speed and coasters when using Nvidia drivers.

You said you had DMA enabled in the other thread, but I'm really too sleepy to read all of it. Can you verify that even though you 'enabled (DMA if available) that device manager actaully shows DMA on for the ide channels your burner is on?

And the 1693S should use UDMA mode 4, not mode 2...I think you mentioned mode2 in the other thread. A DVD-Rom reader would use Mode 2, I think.

Since you said "DMA2", makes me think something else *besides* your burner is using DMA2, cuz 1693S is a DMA4 drive. And I just looked and mine is using UDMA 4 for the burner. (2 for the 166S).

Your burners are *NOT* on a SATA connection (with an IDE-sata cable), are they?? And if they're on a "SI3114" connector, for God's sake, remove them......

In the settings it would not allow you to change the DMA 2 to DMA 4.. You can only choose between DMA and PIO.. The system chooses whether you can use DMA 2 or DMA 4.. I have the same scenerio, my computer is currently set to DMA 2 on the secondary IDE channel.. I have no control over choosing DMA 4..

In any case, I dont have any problems on my system.. You should look at all the drivers that are installed for you burner in Device Manager.. You may want to remove ones that you really dont use or need.. There may be a conflict between all the drivers that you have installed..

But windows should set the highest DMA mode available, if it is detected as such in the BIOS.

If it detects in the BIOS as a UDMA 4 drive, then why wouldn't windows set it there? Usually it sets it lower if it finds errors or other problems, or if there is a chipset issue or limitation. UDMA2 is ATA/33, and the drive is an ATA/100 drive. But I'm using an intel chipset, so.....iono......

Anyway, the original poster still needs to check what chipset drives hes using....

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is'nt UDMA4 ATA66? In my bios it's detected as ATA66, and KProbe tells me UDMA4. I'm running Windows ME, it tells only DMA is on.
I achieved UDMA4 after I changed the IDE cable from 40 to 80 wires.

Leo

Maybe Im using IDE cables with 40 wires.. I doubt it since they are fairly new and rated up to ATA -133 and they are the same ones that I connected my hard drives to my motherboard with before I switched to SATA..

Im going to take a look into the BIOS.. Im a bit dumbfounded with the DMA4 issue..

For those of you interested in Ultra DMA4 and 80 Conductor cables needed to acheive it, go the following web page.. It explains it in detail..

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id...Cable80-c.html

---Yeah I read up on that myself and it did no good... even when using a driver cleaner, still the same slow results.

---I know that in 1 of the screen capts, it shows DMA-2 and that is when I had the 832/166S. Currently it shows DMA-4 ever since I installed the 1693s. Also, it does show that DMA is under the device manager listing etc. Everything is seemingly showing up fine and with the right settings etc... but again the burn speeds are not reflective of them.

---No not at all! lol, strictly Pata for them.

I think I'm going to reluctantly have to do a fresh install on one of my other partitions and see if that indeed does the trick, for which I'm sure it will... another alternative I've heard about is completely removing ASPI and just letting Nvid drivers do their thing along with STPI. Sounds ridiculous, but others have claimed success with this method.

Finally a DMA4 answer..

It seems that the BenQ 1640 and Lite-On SOHW 1693S do NOT support DMA4.. If you look at the technical specifications found on BenQ's site and Lite-On's site it clearly states so..

BenQ
Supported IDE Mode PIO mode 0/1/2/3/4
DMA mode 0/1/2
UDMA mode 0/1/2

Lite-On
Supported transfer mode : PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2 and Ultra DMA mode 2

http://www.benq.com/products/product...specifications
http://www.liteonamericas.com/us/DVDRW_1693S.htm

For those of you that have systems that show your IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers operating at Ultra DMA 4 on your burner lines, its meaningless.. Your drive is still operating at Ultra DMA 2..

I suspect that this is an issue relating to the BIOS and/or the drive itself and that it incorrectly shows the drives as using UDMA 4.. The link I provided above at pcguide explains how the BIOS distinguishes DMA setting on POST based on the IDE cables your using and the drives they are attached to.. While this error doesnt affect the drives performance, it is misleading..

Ah, thanks for the info... I figured that the DMA-4 ident in the dev manager was way false... damn, I wish I could figure this problem out... I can still burn decent Kprobe results, but uuuugh 3.8-5x burns on 8x+ media I'm spending $ on is annoying. And watching that stupid a$$ buffer dive like a submarine, no matter what the speed setting is VERY frustrating! Thanks all...

Try rebooting your computer with one drive connected and see what happens.. Theres obviously a transfer bottleneck somewhere which is causing the buffer underruns and the slow burning speeds..

Tried that already and with both channels/cables, tested multiple cables to make sure they weren't bad... none of the typical stuff like cables, jumpers, drivers seem to be the issue. I've tested all of those outlets multiple times just to make sure. This seems like something either advanced or a very overlooked setting (I hope) :-(

Good information
But what exactly -is- UDMA 0 ? And UDMA 1, for that matter?

I know that UDMA 2 is "ATA/33", and UDMA4 is ATA/100 (UDMA5 is ATA/133, I'm not sure what ATA/150 (SATA) is, though.

The ATA/33 HDD's were all UDMA2...I never saw anything that was UDMA1 or 0....

I think,correct me if im wrong
UDMA 2 is ATA/33
UDMA 4 is ATA/66
UDMA 5 is ATA/100
UDMA 6 is ATA/133

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/modes_UDMA.htm

UDMA Mode 0 is 16.7MB/s
UDMA Mode 1 is 25.0MB/s

While you havent seen these types of modes, they are possible if you get quite old CD-ROMs that support those factors before the UDMA Mode 2 standard was developed..

SATA is independant of the IDE controller and therefore operates on faster scale than PATA.. You have to keep in mind that the PATA standard is quite old, introduced in the 1980's.. Theres only so much bandwidth you can obtain with it..

For more information on Serial ATA and how it operates check out this PDF file..

http://www.serialata.org/docs/serialata10a.pdf

BTW: On my system, my SATA controller shows itself set to UDMA mode 6 with a transfer rate of 1.5GB/s which is ATA-150..

V12|V12, I have the same problem.
I have a SONY DW-U18A, which is a rebadged 812s, crossflashed to 832s.

I changed cables, power supply unit, made a clean install of XP and installed sp2, still nothing.

Bios says udma2 for dvd recorder and udma4 for hdd, but windows says udma1 and udma 3! I fixed this by editing the registry but there is no improvement. Every time I boot I have to apply the registry settings. It is interesting that windows doesn't allow to choose udma greater than the one supported by the drives. This is happening for a long time and no data corruption ever occured.

If you find something, please let me know.

My chipset is Via Appollo pro 133.

Guy... I WISH I knew! I'm STILLLLLLLLLLLLLLL trying to solve this stupid mystery! I think I've ruled it down to driver/bus issue. No wait! I've also tried stripping NF2 IDE drivers and going back to stock XP drivers... NO help there either! I've even tried removing ASPI also and just running off of STPI... NO HELP! arhgaorrrr!?!

I know it's not a hardware problem. I've tried cables, PSU's, everything anyone can think of! And again I refuse to just fresh install and sweep the problem under the rug... but at the same time. OMFGGGG I'm finding more and more DVD's I made turning out to be corrupt, even though the data verification claimed successful! I'm going to have to fresh install on another drive and test this garbage out unfortunatle... NOBODY seems to have a definitive answer to this stupid problem..... WHY GOD?!

BTW-I'm SERIOUS about that $15 paypal!! F_ck this, I'm offering MONEY for some to figure this sh!t out, I'm sick of it!

Hello again.

Have you changed anything in the BIOS to try to solve this problem? I checked the manual for the Abit NF7-S, and it seems like it has a few options that would help with performance in some cases, but would cause issues in others. Something that caught my eye was an IDE Prefetch Mode option. This, along with other things, might be causing the drives to mess up. Again, I have no experience with your motherboard, or the nVidia NFx chipsets in general.

Also, your Maxtor drive (went back and looked through the old thread)-is it PATA or SATA? You mentioned it was running at ATA 133, but some drives don't exactly play right with the SATA 150 standard. Maxtor's site lists the drive as being either, depending on what you bought. The Sil 3112A SATA controller could possibly not be playing along with the nForce southbridge's integrated IDE. These are just initial thoughts, but they are worth asking about.

1 more thing: you mentioned a Western Digital? What is the model of it, and is it SATA/PATA?

---Hrmm, as far as I know, I cannot find anything that's in the bios that would be causing a problem. I've checked all the settings, and believe me, I mean ALL of them.

--- Both of my drives are Pata, so the Sata isn't an issue. I have the controller turned off by default in the bi

*Sigh* I think I'm going to scrap my LiteOn drives and get a BenQ or an NEC... this whole 1:1 disc backup scene is dead/almost. It's all about emulation now. What with drive makers seemingly/coincidentally offering LESS and LESS technology for copying sectors, reading errors, as almost if they are being pressured or frankly working with media producers to LIMIT our LEGAL rights to back up our data... it's a null game at this point. LiteOn USED to be THE DRIVE for all this... but now nobody is THE anything- but pwnd.

Thanks for the ideas though!

Hello V12,

Just curious, is this burner all alone on it's channel, or is it SLAVE with an other device on the channel.

I'm thinking that if an other device is attached to the same IDE channel, it might effect the BIOS selection for DMA settings.

Tried is as MASTER all alone on it's chain ?

Curious...

I'm also amused that people are scratching their heads why they can't burn above 5x, when I sit back and relax, while I burn at 2x and make 0% coasters

My 2 cents...

Yeah the drive IS master on the channel connected to my 166S reader. But I've tried it on it's own cable(s) mastered etc.... still the same shit. It's some kind of transfer buffering issue. Hardware is completely ~99.98 ruled out. It's OS/Driver based, I can feel it. Something about this stupid ass NForce chipset + whacky a$$ drivers is to blame. But I haven't found out just WHAT is doing it... Thanks for the inquiry though... Oh and 2x is just WAAAAAAAAAY too slow! Anything below 8x is just not worth bothering with unless I'm about to go somewhere or do something else time consuming to ease the annoying wait - OR it's a quality issue for game backups...
Although I think I may have made some leeway: After upgrading firmware to 1693-KC4B, I did burn a DVD ISO at 8x setting in about 9min with Nero, which I think is about the appropriate time for that speed setting (eh?) I'm scared to try it with DVDdecrypter since no matter WTF setting I've used with it in the past, it's just been a POS with the stupid buffering and burning 8x in the 14min's!!!!! So I guess I'll rip something tonight and give it a try, while trying to refrain from SMASHING my burner's bezel into the case.... wish me luck!

err, i don't want to read the whole thread -so here is what slipped my mind.. a while back.
- the TARGET DiSC should be on a different IDE port of the SOURCE DiSC or HDrive
- FirmWare upgrade might fix the problem, well it did increase aprox. 2-4x on my LG CD Burner
- NTFS is faster than Fat32, also if your XP is on Fat32 and the SOURCE is NTFS(or vice versa, i tested and forgot this one) it WILL slow down your burn(or even copy from one partition to another, example-> Fat32 XP copy from NTFS part. to Fat32 part.) and i forgot what WinXP utilize better... NTFS or Fat32, its in the Micro$otf MSDN site or somewhere i dunno.
- is the IDE cable the correct type?? my friend complain something like this, he uses a PIO cable while his MainB support DMA ..this one slipped my mind when i'm typing this reply, honest!!

Hell yeah, I was surprised to see that the 1693 would support DMA4 here...
Only a few drives from Plextor and Pioneer supporting UDMA4 yet.

And FAT32 is not necessarily slower than NTFS. It depends on a bunch of factors.

---Yeah, the Burner is on a sep chain (2) than the HD's. It's Mastered w/my slaved 166S. The HD's are on chain (1). I tested them with HDtach and the speeds were right inline with what's expected of them.

---I'm thinking that this new K4CB is working... I will test out an 8x DVD burn with DVD decrypter tonight. Again nero did it in ~9min which is expected.

--- Both of my drives have XP installed and both of them are NTFS.

---Yes the IDE cables (80pin) are the correct types. I have tried multiple 80pin cables before and the issue was still there.... again hopefully this new firmware will solve this lame issue... for I'm starting to find some corrupted DVDs from previous firmware revisions and I'm pissed since I long since Deleted the master image and had to toss the discs!

Thanks for posting and trying to help!

Well... FKNXKNFOWUA! I tried a DVD ISO with DVDdecrypter and it went back to it's usual F*ing buffering issues... so it's either that prog doesn't like my burner or system setup. THis is just amazingly frustrating.......