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DVD Burner won't burn at potential speed

S

slowpogo

Member
I have a new NEC 3550A DVD burner, $35 at newegg...It works as advertised when burning CDs (48x) but not when burning DL DVDs.

The drive is rated at 8x for DVD+R DL, but when I try to burn a disc using DVD Decrypter, with speed set to "Max," it will only reach 4.2x. Yes, the Verbatim media itself is rated at 8x (actually 10x max).

What might cause this? The burner as a 2MB buffer with underrun protection, and even at 4.2x the buffer is stable and full. My system, however, uses an older IDE HDD and only has 256MB of ram.

Any ideas what might keep this burner from going at full-blast and how to fix that?

EDIT: I am burning from an ISO image file on the hard drive, not drive-to-drive.
 
As with various other drives, it has a buffer underrun protection and will automatically adjust the speed down when it has to do so. I have seen issues like this with other people as well, even some burning regular DVDs at 1x because of insufficient resources. If you can, try and drop more Ram in. Also, would be helpful to be more descriptive than "older IDE HDD" Would appreciate knowing the OS...
 
media could eb a factor in this. some brands work as advertised with my DVD burner but others don't. i don't understand why its like this but it happens.
 
update firmware?
i bought some office depot discs that were rated at 16x. I tested a couple and they would only burn at 4x on my nec 3540 (nero wouldn't even let me select anything higher). after updating the firmware (i think it was one of the hacked ones) on the drive, i can select and burn at full speed.
 
OK...yeah, the first thing I did once I installed the drive was to update the firmware, so it's current. To be more specific, my computer is a 5 year old Dimension 8200, running XP Home. I don't know what brand the hard drive is, or anything about it, other than that it's the stock drive that came with the computer (80GB).

I'll try another brand of media, though there's hardly anything out there as far as 8x DVD+R DL...
 
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