I think the answer is obvious here but after some trial and error I found that the BEST writing speed I could get was with the following setup:

HDD on Primary Master
CDR on Secondary Master
2410B on Secondary Slave

I could burn 610MB in just under 5min. The problem I found is that once the burner ramps up to 24x, the data flow can't keep up and the smartburn kicks in all the time as the buffer drains and fills every few seconds. At the beginning two stages of the burn (16x and 20x) the buffer doesn't drain. All I can think of at this point is that UDMA33 can't keep up with a 24x burn. I also noticed using NeroSpeed that the best read performance I could get was just under 24x. All things point to an IDE bottleneck, right?

Am I right here or am I overlooking something? AI is off, DMA is on, I'm on a celery 400 w/128MB and a slow 3.1GB HD (yes, I'm still in the stone age).

Thanks,
Zasada

Best setup is:

HDD Master IDE1
CDrom Slave IDE1
Writer Master IDE2
CDrom and writer both set to DMA on

This allows the full bandwidth of IDE2 for your writer.

Consider upgrading your HDD to at least an ATA/UDMA66 model. Even if your IDE bus is only ATA/UDMA33 you will get much faster transfer off a more modern HDD, especially if you use an 80 way ATA66/100 ribbon cable. You are probably only getting 3mb per second transfer off your existing HDD which is too slow for writing at 24x.
Unless you have a blazingly fast CDrom drive you won't be able to copy on the fly at 24x without SmartBurn cutting in so always copy via the HDD

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(in reply to Zasada)

Actually, I tried the above setup (HDD and CDR on Primary, CDRW on Secondary) and got bad results. The CDR read light kept flickering on when the HDD was accessing so I figured that the CDR was slowing the HDD transfers down (which it was). I have tried all configurations and having the CDR and CDRW on the same channel is by far the fastest. I won't need to copy from the CDR on the fly so that isn't very important.

What I can't understand is why both the CDRW and CDR peak out at just under 24x when reading (the line in CDSpeed goes flat). DMA is on in both Windoze and the bios. Hmph. When I burn in Nero the read buffer never goes below 95% but the CDRW buffer is continually depleting. To me that says the HDD can get the info to the read buffer fast enough, but the data can't get from the read buffer to the CDRW buffer fast enough.

This really isn't THAT big of a deal (I can always just burn at 20x) but it would be nice for my new burner to "be all that it can be". ;)

Thanks,
Zasada

(in reply to Zasada)