Win7 multitasking - test please!

[Millennium12]

How are your sata burners multitasking? - chipset up to it?
Can you test and report back?

Having a AM3 770 chipset I must conclude burning concurrently with 2 sata writer apparently is too much as the imgburn buffer bars are constantly jumping up/down/pausing for buffer fill... even the CPU is only 12% utilised.

are your writers running dry? what is your situation, what is your chipset?

would be nice to have some feedback

[getit29]

Would be nice to know the brand(s) of your burners if they are Sony Optiarc or re badged Sony Optiarc
burners then that is normal for the buffer levels to go up and down like that. I’m running an AMD 790GX
chip-set mobo and I’m using 4 burners 3 Samsung S203B’s and a Sony Optiarc AD-7240S the 7240S is the
only one that the buffer fluctuates on it goes from 90% down to 5% and then back up and then back down
then back up and then back down constantly.

It will do it even if it is the only burner that is burning at the time and it doesn’t matter if the burning speed
is 8x or 24x it still does it. I can use all 4 burners at the same time and the Samsung’s buffers pretty well stay
steady at 96 - 98% but not the 7240S as the buffer level goes wild on it.

[Millennium12]

thanks for your feedback - pretty much what I would expect but not with a 770 chipset it seems.

yep, two burners here Samsung 223B, Win7 with 4GB 1333 ram and a Phenom2 550 CPU (unlocked 4 cores)

single session burns full bars all the time for me - no problem, but dual session means imgburn is frequently waiting for the HDD to fill up the buffers again (both burn sessions) basically frequently pausing the burn for a few seconds. That can’t be right!

For a system this powerful I would expect full buffers all the time with no issues. Instead apparently trying hard to keep buffers going. It’s quite embarrassing to watch this.

[Dee]

CPU speed probably doesn’t matter to much, it’s probably down to the HDD speed and design of the SATA controller.

[Millennium12]

not many interested it seems!

[getit29]

Yes it sounds like either the hdd is struggling to keep up or the SATA controller to me also
and with that system and the 223B burners you shouldn’t be seeing that buffer problem.
What speed are you burning at maybe if you slow it down a little bit that might help and
make sure you keep your hdd defraged as a fragmented hdd will slow things down quite a
bit unless you are using a SSD hdd and they say they do not require defraging.

[Millennium12]

My two hdds are WD green (5000AADS) should be easily capable of serving two burners whatever burn speed. ATTO disk benchmark tells a healthy 80-90MB/s for both drives. Defrag/cleanup once a week cycle so no issue here.

Burning should be all the way a smooth ride even multi session

Conclusion tells me that either the chipset/driver or Win7 is very bad at real multitasking. Not sure my next system is a AMD again

[Dee]

I only have 2 burners in this PC (Intel Core i5 750, 4GB RAM, P55 chipset, Vertex SSD, Windows 7 x64).
It copes no problem with 2 burns at 20x.

PC2 has a Intel Q9550, 8GB RAM, P45 chipset, and an Agility SSD, again running Windows 7 x64.
It also has 4 burners, and it can cope with 4 burns without problems, so it’s not Win7

I’d still say it’s an HDD, SATA controller, or perhaps even a badly written SATA driver.

BTW: How much CPU power is being eaten when you’re burning?

[Millennium12]

you can say that in short - it’s AMD… likely my chipset/driver

as stated in my first message cpu usage is hovering ~ 12% on all cores when both burners are writing. It’s no cpu load issue.

[Dee]

I think there are quite a few members here are running AMD, maybe they can pop in with their experiences with burning.

[Millennium12]

problem is hardly anyone is burning concurrently - therefore these problems appear not to exist since no one is noting the problem.

I would appreciate more feedback from other AMD chipsets in this scenario

[DrageMester]

Having done some tests on an old Pentium 4 machine, I’d say it’s almost entirely down to the performance characteristics of the harddrive(s) that have to deliver the data, and the “multi-tasking” capability of the harddrive is the deciding factor.

If the harddrive is not good at servicing multiple simultaneous data-streams, the other system characteristics are completely uninteresting.

[Millennium12]

we would see clearer when we have some more [B]AMD[/B] based tests here. I am fairly sure my hdds in an Intel box would deliver nicely.

let’s wait and see or maybe not see

[chef]

Post #12 said it all precisely.