The drive's buffer (as displayed in your burning program) should ALWAYS be full or near full. The drive doesn't start burning to the disk until the buffer fills up. This is in case the CPU/hard drive stop streaming data to the drive, the drive can continue burning using the data in the buffer, so that the disc isn't ruined (coaster) due to a buffer underrun. A buffer underrun is when the drive's buffer empties, and it has to stop burning data; the disc can't be "continued" on older drives in this case. Newer drives have some form of buffer underrun protection, like BURNProof, so that if the buffer empties, it can "pause" the burning. Some drives that don't have a protection routine like that come with a large buffer, like 8MB, so that there is more time for the system to start sending data before the buffer empties (a 2MB buffer on a 20X burner only lasts 2 thirds of a second, 8MB on a 40X is only 1.3 seconds). If you ever see your drive's buffer display dipping down, it means the hard drive or the CPU has gotten very busy suddenly. Even on systems that are heavily used though, it's hard to cause a buffer underrun anymore, because the CPU and memory and hard drive are fast enough to return to load up a bit more data to the drive. Also most burning programs have a memory cache, so they load up some data to memory so it doesn't have to wait for the hard drive to be available, so things like texture swapping in a game won't necessarily prevent data getting to the drive.
Facebook
Twitter