Problems burning DVDs on 2 burners simultaneously

entropy1982

Golden Member
Jul 10, 2005
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I'm using nero and it basically takes like 20-25 mins to burn 2 dvds (with 2 burners) at 16x. I notice that the buffer keeps going all the way down and then back up as it's burning.

When I burn the dvds individually in either one of the burners, it's fine and only takes about 5 mins or so per dvd. Any ideas? The hd i'm burning from is a 250gig sata hitachi drive.


thanks
 

n7

Elite Member
Jan 4, 2004
21,281
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Yup.

Precisely why i so badly want SATA optical drives.

If you use the same HDD (from which you are burning stuff), or if you have the two opticals on the same IDE channel, it's a slow bottlenecked joke.

All SATA devices with their own individual channels ftw! (If only i had that...)
 

entropy1982

Golden Member
Jul 10, 2005
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well actually each optical drive is on a difft ide channel

btw nice to hear from you again n7 been a long time =)
 

Nocturnal

Lifer
Jan 8, 2002
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So so long you have two SATA burners you can burn at the full 16x on each one and the system should not be bottlenecked?
 

Nocturnal

Lifer
Jan 8, 2002
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Originally posted by: entropy1982
well actually each optical drive is on a difft ide channel

btw nice to hear from you again n7 been a long time =)

Maybe the two drives are stressing out the SATA hard drive so much that it needs to buffer the data?
 

Zepper

Elite Member
May 1, 2001
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You want to have all IDE drives on separate channels for best performance in that situation and you have to remember you have only 133 MB/sec total bandwidth on PCI so it is possible you are saturating the PCI bus. Don't see your second burner in your system list. BTW, why don't you log all that stuff over on the Anandtec side in My Rigs and not waste all your sig space on that. Or are you just an exhibitionist... ;)

And there are special cards out there meant for duplication setups that actually send the data to all the burners simultaneously, so you don't have multiple data streams on the bus. I think they are guaranteed to work only with certain, tested makes and models of burner.

.bh.
 

Seekermeister

Golden Member
Oct 3, 2006
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Zepper,

And there are special cards out there meant for duplication setups that actually send the data to all the burners simultaneously, so you don't have multiple data streams on the bus. I think they are guaranteed to work only with certain, tested makes and models of burner.
I know about SATA controller cards, but apparently you are speaking of something else...what kind of card is dedicated to this purpose?
 

entropy1982

Golden Member
Jul 10, 2005
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Originally posted by: Zepper
You want to have all IDE drives on separate channels for best performance in that situation and you have to remember you have only 133 MB/sec total bandwidth on PCI so it is possible you are saturating the PCI bus. Don't see your second burner in your system list. BTW, why don't you log all that stuff over on the Anandtec side in My Rigs and not waste all your sig space on that. Or are you just an exhibitionist... ;)

And there are special cards out there meant for duplication setups that actually send the data to all the burners simultaneously, so you don't have multiple data streams on the bus. I think they are guaranteed to work only with certain, tested makes and models of burner.

.bh.

I have a 16x lightscribe samsung drive.... i forgot the exact model
 

gramboh

Platinum Member
May 3, 2003
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16x DVDR peaks at 22.1MB/s, so burning two would be 44.2MB/s, a good 7200RPM drive might struggle with that read speed from certain parts of the hard disk, depending, but I wouldn't expect the buffer to drop all the time, it might be interface overhead (my guess).
 

Bobthelost

Diamond Member
Dec 1, 2005
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Originally posted by: gramboh
16x DVDR peaks at 22.1MB/s, so burning two would be 44.2MB/s, a good 7200RPM drive might struggle with that read speed from certain parts of the hard disk, depending, but I wouldn't expect the buffer to drop all the time, it might be interface overhead (my guess).

Depends, if it's seeking between two areas for the information then it will be starting to hurt. Same goes if it's fragmented to hell and back.