Unstable Device Buffer=Terrible Burns/Low Speeds

CD, DVD and (Ultra HD) Blu-ray Writers LiteOn / PLDS / Sony Writer
#1

I hope some of you guys can help me out.

I have a Sony DRU-700A which has been flashed from a DW-D18A using the 700AVS0B firmware. I’ve got it in a USB2.0 caddy, BlueEye I believe. My laptop has a USB2.0 card plugged in with all the correct drivers. The drive is recognized just fine on my WinXP SP2 laptop.

When burning, using DVD Decryptor, the device buffer is fluctuating like crazy. This is causing the burn speed to drop from the selected speed of 2x to approx .8x and even then it will fluctuate between .6x and 1x. I’m using Verbatim DVD-R media and though it takes forever, the burns work well in my Playstation 2. They will not work in my DVD player though.

I know that my burner is okay. I have hooked it up to my father’s laptop, also running WinXP SP2 with USB2.0 onboard. It works perfectly fine, no device buffer or speed fluctuation AND the dvds play perfectly in both the Playstation and the DVD player.

At first I thought the USB2.0 card I bought wasn’t supplying enough power, so I took it back and got a Belkin that comes with an additional AC power supply. It didn’t help, still has crazy fluctuations. Even plugging the caddy up to the USB1.1 yields wacky buffer rates. Something has got to be up with my laptop since it works fine with my father’s.

My guess is poor memory usage, and I’ve tried closing all unneccessary programs before burning, but it doesn’t help. One thing I haven’t tried is using Nero instead, but I haven’t got a copy of that.

The firmware flash didn’t seem to help but it didn’t seem to make matters any worse either, because it did the same thing as a DW-D18A. I bet I’m missing something really obvious here :slight_smile:

Hope you guys can be of some help!!

#2

Make sure you defag your hard drive an make sure it has plenty of free space (5-10GB). What speed is the CPU? How much memeory does it have?

#3

Could it be the processor speed?

I also use a laptop with a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card, and I get ok burns (with Ritek DVD+R).

The specs:
Liteon 812sx burner with latest stock FW
IBM Thinkpad with 500 MHz Celeron
320 MByte memory
Windows 2000
Nero

However:
I burn only ISO-s from my HD. (I create the ISO’s first from my data: that is not really speed sensitive - other than being sometimes slow) I also make sure that nothing else runs while burning (however the firewall, antivirus etc. remains on). I also switch off all other USB devices while burning (USB HD, USB CD writer etc.)

Burning speed 4x.
CPU usage 53%

I will try soon one of the patched firmware-s (my burner is brand new - so I wanted to test it stock first) - and I hope I will get even better results… (thanks C0deKing!)

I hope that helps.

Miklos

#4

It’s not a matter of burner firmware.
It’s the whole hardware config, though we can not say you at this moment where the bottleneck is.

It may be: HD DMA configuration AND/OR HD quality (speed) AND/OR HD partitions free space AND/OR pagefile location and size AND/OR USB port ‘real’ bandwidth AND/OR CPU real performance AND/OR hidden processes / XP SP2 services AND/OR IDE cables, AND/OR chipset updated / drivers, etc, etc. Just to give you some examples.

Hope this helps

#5

Thanks for the input guys!

From going under primary IDE and secondary IDE I can see that it is set to “DMA if available.” The HD is just the factory installed one that shipped with the laptop. I haven’t taken it out to see the speed.

I’ve defragmented it though and set my pagefile to 2x my RAM (448x2=896) and all I can tell about the location is that its at C:\pagefile.sys. I haven’t defragged since readjusting the pagefile size.

How do I adjust the USB bandwith?
Any known processes with SP2 that hog up resources?

Should I set the jumper on this burner to slave like I would a HD or is that even necessary?