Joined: 07 Feb 2009 Posts: 1306 Location: Vilnius, Lithuania
I use DVD-RAM for backup purposes as it's supposed to be lasting alot longer than just DVD-R. Problem is that writing to DVD-RAM is slower than a snail on tranquillizers, but there is a solution, well sort of...
If you install Oracle's VirtualBox and in it a copy of XP, and a copy of InCD, writing DVD-RAMs suddenly will become several orders of magnitude faster. It's still not very fast (1 Gb per 5-8 minutes), but you won't get messages like "17 hours remaining" anymore.
Were you getting the thing where the drive would spin up, then stop, then spin up, then stop? Mine started doing that in W7 and was making everything much slower.
I ended up writing the images to the hard drive, then using the built in W7 burner software. It would at least spin up the drive and keep it going.
Also...did you check to make sure the drive wasn't reverted to PIO mode? Win7 will make a Herculean effort to make the drive work, it will automatically downgrade the speed and interface until the errors stop.
But, once it's decided there is a problem, it leaves the drive in that downgraded state. So you put in an old game or movie with scratches, and every time you get 6 read errors, Win7 drops the drive down a level. It does NOT reset the speed for the next disk.
One of the reasons that cause your drive to burn slow all of a sudden is Windows will turn off DMA mode for a burner after encountering errors during data transfer operations. If more than six DMA transfer timeout occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.
Follow the steps mentioned below to turn on DMA mode.
a. Click on Start button.
b. Right click on Computer and select Properties.
c. Select Device Manager, from the left panel of the Properties window.
d. Select IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.
e. From there, right click on each of the channels and choose ‘Properties
Joined: 07 Feb 2009 Posts: 1306 Location: Vilnius, Lithuania
I had seen the above post looking for a solution. Problem is that the whole system is SATA. I even uninstalled the drivers, rebooted and the same ones came back.
As for the discs, they come straight out of the shrink-wrap and as I said, XP running in VirtualBox has no problems whatsoever with them.
Joined: 07 Feb 2009 Posts: 1306 Location: Vilnius, Lithuania
There are no IDE/ATAPI devices, just one entry under the "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers", named "AMD SATA Controller". Going into the BIOS and changing the DVD-RAMs to (emulated?) IDE, with DMA, doesn't solve anything, time goes from 25 minutes (for 4.24Gb, 57 dirs with 685 files) at the start to well over an hour after about 10 minutes, at which stage just over 0.5Gb has been copied.
The problem is copying data to DVD-RAM via Explorer, COPY, XCOPY, etc. Do it via ImgBurn and it works, well sort of, as the resulting disk is unmodifiable, to the extent that you can just reformat it, the files themselves are R-O and not fiddling around will change this.
The problem isn't DMA v PIO, it's something else and so far no amount of Google'ing has given me a solution.
