Hi there, I think the title is fairly self explanatory. I recently got an external caddy (Firewire) and a 109 drive and everything seems 'ok'. Only problem is, I have burnt 2 DVD's so far, a 4.5GB film and a 2GB PS2 Game, both of which were burnt from a .iso file on my main Hard Drive. In both cases I used 8x discs and burned with alcohol, however I set the speed to 8x for the movie, and then down to 4x for the game (after I had had issues with burning the movie) Anyway, during the burning process the buffer would reach 100% and the speed did eventually get up to 8x, but soon the buffer would start to drop, and so would the speed going down to 0.3x at the worst case. The same happened for the game except it peaked at 4x. The CPU usage never went above 15% and there were no other programs running at the time. I have yet to try a CD, but I will hopefully do so today. Anyway, does anyone know why this may be happening? As I rememeber I had a similar problem with my 52x CD burner at home when I burnt an image with it using alcohol. Is this a common issue with alcohol 120% or am I doing something wrong. On a side note, I am having som slight issues with the drive which maybe someone can help me with. I bought the drive and caddy from www.svp.co.uk and in the instructions, it stated that the drivers were only needed for the USB connection that that if Firewire was used, then the drive was simply plug and play. Well when I first connected the drive, it came up with the 'New Hardware Found' Wizard, which I thought was odd, but I followed through the steps and let windows update search for the drivers. However it couldn't find any. So I closed that and looked in my computer and there it was. No problems it would seem. However, every now and then it disappears from My Computer, and becomes 'inactive', i.e. I can't even open the drive. The fan of the enclosure is still spinning, but there is no response from the drive itself. I was thinking that maybe it was an auto off feature of the Firewire, but then again if you read the following paragraph: This has happened during the process of ripping a CD too. Using CDex, I started to rip a CD and the first track was going fine, but it stopped on 99%, and froze. If I canceled the rip, the program would stay open, but the Drive would again have become inactive, requiring me to turn it off and on again. This exact issue happened with another program too stopping at the end of the first track, however when i ripped the songs with iTunes, it completed the whole CD with no problems??? Wow. that a lot of info there. I would really appreciate some views on this. Thanks EDIT: I have just burned a CD and it was 'OK'. It took about 10 mins to burn 39 mins of music, which is not the maximum spped it should be at by far, and in the whole process the disc drive never 'sped up' to the point where it makes a load of noise like at 52x burning, SO I would guess that it was burning at about 16x??? I am just running Nero CD-DVD speed for a DVD, and it's showing a similar pattern to the burning process. EDIT # 2: Here are the results from my benchmark testing: CD Test - http://www.bath.ac.uk/~en3adcr/bst/PIONEER_DVD-RW__DVR-109_CD1.40.html DVD Test - http://www.bath.ac.uk/~en3adcr/bst/PIONEER_DVD-RW__DVR-109_1.40.html Anyone have any ideas?
i would not recommend burning movies over 4x and games i burn at 1x ( even though it gets up to 3.8x, just cause my burner is new and wont burn at 1x) i never have problems. so try slower speeds and see if that works.
Yeh well the slowest it will burn is 4x, and as I mentioned I tried that on the Game and it gave me the same issues. I have updated the Firmware, and that seems to have smoothed out the benchmark tests considerably with the DVD I tried reaching 12x. But it still has the problems with the ripping, although seems to last longer before it needs a turn off/turn on.
