Pioneer A106 - should I use a ATA-66 (80 wire) cable?

[ctrlbreak]

Hi,

I've recently purchased an OEM pioneer A106, and I've hooked it up to one of my IDE channels using a standard 40 wire IDE cable.

I have successfully burned a couple of DVD-Rs at 4x, but notice that the drive buffer (small progress bar in nero) seems to jump around wildly from 100% right down to 10% or less, then back again.

Is this a problem? 4x tranfers data at over 5MB/sec, so I wondered if the drive supported/required an 80wire ATA-66 cable, and if this would help?

Thanks in advance.

[ashy]

No, using 80 pin cable won't make a difference.
A standard 40 pin ATA 33 cable can transfer data at 33 MB/s so that is not your problem.

The buffer actually does vary quite a bit sometimes, but shouldn't be a problem because your drive has buffer underun protection anyway.

If it bothers you and you want to try to improve it then check how your drive is configuired.
I.E. is it a slave or a master and which IDE channel is it on and which other devices does it share with?

Is your controller set to DMA or PIO?

Post back and I'll try to assist with some advice.