not really support, but technical

[Calin]

I have now a 7200rpm IDE drive (Seagate Barracuda IV), with two partitions. The second partition (the last 20GB of the drive) is formatted FAT32.
I have now an GoldStar GSA-4160B DVD writer, and I write DVDs at 4x (sometime at 8x).


THE PROBLEM is: a short time after the writing process, any other program I want to start, it takes a long time, and in that time the DVD buffer jumps down to 12% in certain occasions, and the memory buffer used by writing program depletes.
What would be the best way to improve the disk access? Options would be:
1. converting partition to NTFS (from FAT32)
2. adding one more IDE drive
3. PCI SATA controller and SATA drive
4. SCSI controller and drive

Feel free to come with other ideas

 

[jackschmittusa]

How much ram do you have and what cpu are you using? Insufficient ram will lead to disk-swapping, and a slower cpu may have difficulty with multi-tasking resource hungry apps.

 

[Calin]

Pentium4 2.4 Northwood 533MHz bus, on an Intel chipset (Gigabyte GA-8PE667 mainboard), with 512MB single channel memory (2 sticks)

 

[GimpyOne]

Any idea if both the hard drive and the DVD are on the same cable? IDE can only access 1 device on a cable at a time, if both are on one channel you are most likely going to have trouble. Especially if you are writing to the DVD from the HD, while trying to do something else using the hard drive.(it doesn't matter how many partitions you have on the HD)

If this is the case, both need to be on separate IDE channels (i.e. cables), and this may help things alot. If you can't do this, and this is the problem, you are probably stuck, unless you stick in a PCI add-in card with another HD and burn from it.

 

[Calin]

They are on different cables, on one cable is a master hard drive (the boot drive) and a ASUS CDRW, on the other is the DVD writer

 

[GimpyOne]

Ok, I guess the next thing to check then is if they are in DMA or PIO mode. The easiest way I think is to go to system properties/hardware/Device manager. Open the IDE controller section and then right click on the primary or secondary channel. Click properties and then advanced settings. All devies should be in some DMA mode, if not, they should be changed to be so.

Beyond this, I'm starting to run out of ideas, but we'll see.