CD-R Not Burning at Proper Speed

[DLzone]

I have a liteon 48x cdrw. My problem is that it will burn at a fast speed for about 20% of a cd, but then stops. It looks like a buffer underun has occured (the red burning light turns orange for a moment and you can hear the cd speed wind down), and then it continues at a slow speed, usually around 24x for the rest of the burning process. What is strange is that Nero's display of the buffer level never drops past 98% so I'm not quite sure why an underrun would have occured in the first place. In addition, this cdr used to run fine on my old pentium 3 600. I have checked my hardware profile and DMA is enabled. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? Also my LG 4x DVD-+R works fine with no problems. Here is a list of my system specs any help would be muuuch appreciated.

UPDATE: It seems that the cd's burned by the Liteon after this occurs have errors. I tried burning a cd full of mp3s to put on my laptop and couldn't copy them over from the cd to the hard drive, I kept getting disc read errors. However, after burning with my LG, they copied over fine. Is this just because the LG's maximum cd burn speed is 24x so the buffer under run doesn't occur or do you think that there is something wrong with my LITEon?

P4 3.0
512 Corsair PC3200
ASUS P4P800 (865 PE)
Liteon 48x12x48x
LG 4x24x2 DVD+-RW
160 g Maxtor
80 g Maxtor
SB Audigy
Radeon 9800 Pro

 

[n7]

I may be off here, but have you tried various media brands (good ones, not cheap ones)?

 

[DLzone]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I have tried lots of different brands. Even some nice TM Fuji.

 

[n7]

Then I would guess the CD-RW is dying, but maybe someone else has ideas.