My NEC 3500A drive will not burn at full speed

[wearetheborg]

System: IBM laptop pentium 4 2Ghz, firewire 800 card.
windows XP, SP2; nero
Also SUSE 9.1 ; k3b

External enclosure(bytech) firewire.

Nero shows burning at 16x, but the real speed is more around 5-6x. The dvd is rated at 8x, but nero shows its supports 16x(taiyo yuden)
I did a read test in nero - speed was 5.5x

Any idea what might be going on?
The firewire cable is 15 feet long, can that be a problem?

 

[JBDan]

Standard 1394/ilink/firewire using 28awg wire are limited to 4.5 meters. Should not be a prob for you, but would test on a shorter length to see if it solves it 🙂

 

[Siddhartha]

How long does it take to burn a 4.5 gig disk?

 

[wearetheborg]

on an 8x rated disc, which the 3500 is supposed to burn at 16x(and which it shows burning at 16x), about 16min.
The speed read test shows the max speed to be about 5.5x, so something is limiting the burn speed.

Another thing I noticed, the fan in the enclosure doesnt spin when the cover is closed - makes me wonder if there is something wrong with the enclosure. But then if something was wrong with the main circuit, the drive would not work at all, it works, but at a reduced speed. 😕

 

[JackBurton]

Well dude, I have a 3500A and Taiyo Yuden 8X DVD-Rs burn at 12X. I think your enclosure is to blame for the long burn time.

 

[Gothgar]

media?

 

[wearetheborg]

Fuji 8x taiyo yudens

 

[Zepper]

Being a FW external might be the problem, but there are ways to tweak FW connections for optimum thruput [sic] - I don't use FW on a regular bases, so I don't know the tweaks. A brief session with google should turn up the tips.
.bh.

 

[wearetheborg]

I tested it out on a sony laptop with integrated firewire(and a diff firewire cable) - there it was giving close to 16x on the read test, so the problem is with my 6pin-9pin firewire cable, or firewire 800 card or some combination thereoff.
I keep hitting 5.5x on the read test on the thinkpad, no matter what DVD (4x or 8x)