Sony DRU510A won't write 4x

I bought a DRU510A writer a few days ago and I have not been able to get it to write at 4x. I am using Nero 6 Ultra, and when I do a speed test before writing it tells me my data source isn't fast enough. This can't be correct. My system specs follow:

Asus A7N8X Deluxe Rev.2
AMD Athlon XP 3000 Barton 400Mhz FSB
1 Gig (2x512) Crucial 3200 DDR RAM
PNY Geforce4 TI 4400
Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM 8MB HD
Western Digital 60GB 7200RPM HD
Plextor 52x24x52 CD-RW
Win2K

I have the Sony set to master on the secondary IDE. I have it set to us DMA. I have updated the firmware to 1.0d. I keep Win2k updated. I disabled my Norton antivirus.

What could the problem be?

I assume you have the Plextor set as slave on the same ide channel. Is it set to use dma as well? What does device manager show for the current transfer mode of each drive?

Which device are you using as the source for the speed test?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hudsonsmith

I assume you have the Plextor set as slave on the same ide channel. Is it set to use dma as well? What does device manager show for the current transfer mode of each drive?

Which device are you using as the source for the speed test?

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Yes, the Plextor is set to slave. Device manager shows both IDE channels (Primary and secondary) are using "Ultra DMA mode". I'm not sure how to check the transfer mode of individual drives in Win2K.

I am using the Maxtor as my data source. It is set as master on the primary IDE.

Everything works fine at 2.4x, but not 4x.

Disable the speed check if you are sure you can get enough transfer speed. And make sure your DVD blanks are 4X compatible.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sirc

Yes, the Plextor is set to slave. Device manager shows both IDE channels (Primary and secondary) are using "Ultra DMA mode". I'm not sure how to check the transfer mode of individual drives in Win2K.

I am using the Maxtor as my data source. It is set as master on the primary IDE.

Everything works fine at 2.4x, but not 4x.

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You can't actually check the drives in W2K. If you open the Advanced Settings tab for either IDE channel, it should display the status for each connected device (Decive 0 and Device 1). Transfer mode would be set to "DMA if available" for each device. Current transfer mode should show then show Ultra DMA mode for each device connected to the channel. It sounds like that's what you're getting - sometimes if one device is set to PIO it will prevent the other from using DMA.

The speed tests are kind of quirky and depend on the file sizes chosen. If the test is using a lot of small files it will fail at the higher speed. I agree with ceebee - go ahead and disable the speed test and try burning one.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hudsonsmith

You can't actually check the drives in W2K. If you open the Advanced Settings tab for either IDE channel, it should display the status for each connected device (Decive 0 and Device 1). Transfer mode would be set to "DMA if available" for each device. Current transfer mode should show then show Ultra DMA mode for each device connected to the channel. It sounds like that's what you're getting - sometimes if one device is set to PIO it will prevent the other from using DMA.

The speed tests are kind of quirky and depend on the file sizes chosen. If the test is using a lot of small files it will fail at the higher speed. I agree with ceebee - go ahead and disable the speed test and try burning one.

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I tried running it without the speed test first. Two coasters later I ran the speed test to find out what was going on.

There was, in fact, a lot of fairly small files. The first failure was when I tried to run Norton Ghost 2003 to back up my HD. So not only was I trying to burn every file on my computer, the program was compressing them during the burn.

The second coaster was from me trying to burn my UT2K3 folder to DVD using Nero just to see if I could. That also failed.

I still think that my system should have been able to handle both of these burns at 4x easily. What happens when 8x or 16x drives arrive?

I would try some more things:
-Leave the HDD and the DVD drive as single masters (get rid of the cdrw for now)
-install the latest chipset & IDE drivers (many times you get a performance boost)
-Update the ASPI layer (download from Adaptec's website)
-If all the above fail to fix try to use the backup software provided by Sony (Veritas BackupNow???)

Success!

Although I am not quite sure what finally fixed the problem. I updated everything I possibly could - bios, motherboard, video, audio, and Nero. I THINK I was still having the same problem after doing all of this.

When I updated Nero the InCD icon appeared in my tray (wasn't there before). I uninstalled InCD and TADA! It worked! A speed test in Nero showed the HD read speed at almost 40 Mb/sec where I was only getting about 3 Mb/sec before.

Now the problem that when I burn at 4x it takes much longer than it should (although at least it burns now). A test burn of my UT2K3 folder (about 3 Gig) took around 18 min. At this point I assume it's the cheap media (Optodisk) I am using that is causing the slow burn.

I will run out to Best Buy today and pick up a few disks from a few different manufacturers and try some comparisons.