OT: DVD burn speed wierdness

YesMaestro wrote on 5/11/2007, 10:06 AM
I have a Pioneer 109 that I burn my dvd's with. I use Nero and usually burn at 4x, but during the current burn project I decided to burn one at 8x to see how much faster it would get done. It was actually slower. At 4x the disc was completed in 11:08, but at 8x it took 15:09. I thought 8x supposed to be faster? What could cause the slowdown?

Paul

Comments

CVM wrote on 5/11/2007, 10:20 AM
One thing that takes FOREVER in Nero is data verification. Perhaps the burn is done at 8x, but verification is at a slower rate? Dunno... just a guess.
johnmeyer wrote on 5/11/2007, 11:09 AM
It is possible that your computer is not able to feed data to the drive at that rate. Nero will stop the burn and then start again if this happens. If you do this again (burn at 8x) watch the progress indications in Nero. Does the buffer go to zero during the burn? It should NOT do that, but if it does, then that's the problem.

I should also point out that my Pioneer A09 died slowly a few months ago, and the failure mode included not being able to reliably buffer data, resulting in lots of starts and stops during the burn. Therefore, not to alarm you, but it is also possible that your burner is going south. You might want to test a burned disc using Nero's DVD Speed to see if there are any errors.

ScottW wrote on 5/11/2007, 11:31 AM
4x and 8x designations are basically meaningless. Here's a web site with a very good discussion on the various factors that affect things like burn speed:

http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/advancedconcepts.htm
Steve Mann wrote on 5/13/2007, 11:56 PM
The nX specification is the data rate, and like firewire 400 and Firewire 800, the number is really marketing hype. There's many things in the data path that can slow down the transfer and to really get 8X data rate, everything in the path has to be working perfectly.