New to DVD Burning - Here are my specs

vbimport
#1

I am relatively new to this. I have lots of movies that I want to back up. So please tell me if there’s any settings that I can improve on (besides getting a super-duper laptop)

  • Dell D600 Laptop
  • External USB 2.0 Drive 7400 RPM (FAT32)
  • External HP DVD 940 Drive (Lightscribe) Dual Layer
  • DVD Fab 3.0.8.0
  • Usually burning at Dual Layer to get 100% Quality
  • Diskeeper to defrag my drives
  • Write at Low Speed 4X (if disc capability is 8x). Should I use the “Recommended” speed in DVDFab?
  • Sony DVD+R DL discs
  • What other settings should I set in DVDFab? I pretty kept it on Default.
#2

infernox
the only thing I can see where you might have a problem is with the sony disks, myself and a few other people had trouble with them (some burners don’t like them) so now I only use verbatim, also using sl disks are much cheaper and you can still get great results with picture quality. You just have to try things to see how they go, if you have problems just ask and I am sure the great crew here will help you out. Have a nice day :slight_smile:
Jim

#3

Yup, like Jim said, the sony discs may or may not be a problem. The only widely recommended DL media are the verbs, but you already have the sony’s and they’re working for you… Next purchase though, I’d look at the verbs.

I think you’d be better off actually choosing a write speed. Some folks run into problems with recommended…but always worked for me when I put it to the test. Personally, I write in the 8-10X range with 16X verbs and about 6X with 8X Taiyo Yuden. This works well with my system. 4X seems to work well for you based on your media, burner and write strategy, so I’d stay right there. I tend to write at 2.4X with DLs…yeah I can go faster, but my bkups are flawless and I’m not in much of a hurry.

You may want to revisit your External USB 2.0 Drive 7400 RPM (FAT32) and consider NTFS. This was recently discussed as it became an issue for a user with a similar setup…ext hdd - FAT32.
This was nicely picked up by signals… :clap: in post #18
Here’s the referenced thread

#4

Thanks Jaminsd. Could you expand on using the SL instead of DL? I want good quality videos for my archive. Do you just customize the archive by deleting some commercials, previews, etc?

#5

Burning DVD’s from a USB hard drive to a USB burner on a laptop isn’t really ideal. 4X DL speed may well be too fast for this. At least put your source material on the internal hard drive before burning. :slight_smile:

#6

quote
[Thanks Jaminsd. Could you expand on using the SL instead of DL? I want good quality videos for my archive. Do you just customize the archive by deleting some commercials, previews, etc?]
If you are running Fab Plat. at the bottom left hand side there is a drop down box which shows DVD-5 or DVD-9 just click on the DVD-5 and it will compress it down to fit on a SL disk, Myself and I think it was Alan who had about 53% compression and there was no noticeable difference between the orignal disk, also burn at around x4 and you should have a good burn

#7

Would it make any difference if it was Firewire connection? I don’t have a large internal drive. Thanks.

#8

Hi again infernox,

I’m not the one to anwer this, but I didn’t want to leave your question hanging. I don’t run any external burners, but both usb 2 and firewire work well as far as requirements/benchmarks. I think one of the crucial issues here again, is the limitation on file size in FAT32 = 4 GB.
I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at the thread I linked above, but it would be worth a look for you.

Hopefully, someone running external burners can give you more specifics.
Anyway, here’s a table of the various file systems so you can see what I mean.

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