Is my DVD Burner losing its touch!?!?

[BurningTorch]

Ok, My previous system was as follows:

AMD Athlon 2000+, 60 GB Hard drive, 256 MB RAM, the reader is a 16x reader for both DVD's/CD's the burner is a Sony 8X DVD burner.

I have been burning DVD's for about a year now, the total is so far roughly around 450 DVDs. When I first got the DVD burner I was able to burn DVD's with no compression within 12-14 minutes. This time includes both the encoding time and the burning time. However, about a month or so ago I noticed something very strange, the burning time began to take longer, and DVD's that once ended in 12-14 minutes ended in upwards of 18 minutes+. I even restarted windows and everything to see if the problem was spyware however still to no prevail.

Recently I bought an entire New system because I had hoped that I would be able to burn faster and at the same time have a decent gaming machine so below are the specs:

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester Socket 939 Dual Core
Motherboard:Abit "KN8" NVIDIA nForce4 Chipset For AMD Socket 939
RAM: Corsair Value Select (Dual Pack) 184 Pin 512MBx4DDR PC-3200
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon X700 PRO 256MB GDDR3 PCI-Express
Hard Drive: Western Digital 74GB Raptor Enterprise SATA 10,000RPM 8MB

^With the new system the old equipment I kept was the 16x reader and the 8X Sony burner. Now after I installed windows and got all the drivers etc, I decided to try a burn. The DVD I tried did not need any compression so I was expecting the result to be a lot faster then the time it took with the old machine because of the faster hard drive, more RAM and a much better processor.

Well, I was half happy, meaning that the encoding part was amazing andh faster then how long it took with my previous machine however the burning was still slower. A disk with no compression still took about 16 minutes! However when I first got the drive in my old computer it burned faster. Now I am scratching my head wondering how this can be and I came to one final conclusion. Over the time of 450 burns the DVD burner should how should I say "lost its touch." My question to you guys is has anyone here experienced this similar problem?

P.S. (I have always wanted to get a 16X burner however I heard rumors that you risk getting a coster or bad results, if anyone can verify this rumor or disprove it, it would be greatly appericated!)

My DVD burner =

[jmet]

Check your DMA settings - How ? do this -> Go to Control Panel> System> Hardware Tab> Device Manager> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers> Right Click Primary IDE channel (and Secondary IDE channel after you finish with Primary)> Properties> Advanced Settings Tab> Transfer Mode or <a href="http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=101616">click here to learn.</a>

Do the above from both "Primary & Secondary IDE channels".

I (We) and you need to look at whats in both "Transfer Mode" and "Current Transfer Mode". Screen shot below is what I'm talking about.


You can also look here for some other solutions: http://sniptools.com/vault/getting-b...windows-xp.htm

If it is in "PIO" mode. Click the "Driver" tab, and uninstall the driver. Then reboot. Upon rebooting windows will automatically reinstall the driver and it should go back to "DMA" mode.

[BurningTorch]

^I checked and there all running at Ultra DMA Mode 2. One though is running at 6 now. I believe I may have fixed it but I am unsure because at the momment I have nothing to burn. See in the system I have both drives share one IDE cable, The burner of course was Master and the reader was slave. I went through my random computer part boxes and found a spare IDE cable and now they both have there own wire and are both master. I hope this will fix the problem. If it doesn't work I don't know whats wrong with it.

[blutach]

Ummm. I don't think so.

You have 2 IDE channels - a primary and a secondary. On each channel are 2 devices (0 and 1). Device 0 is the master and 1 is the slave.

Usually, the primary has your hard drive(s) on it - and these will be the ones set to UDMA5 or 6.

On the secondary is usually your optical devices (UDMA2). They both can't be master cos they both can't be device 0. Set your burner to master and your reader to slave. Use 80 pin cables, especially for the hard drive (not all that a big deal, IMHO, for optical devices).

See the DMA FAQ (Fix your DMA) in my signature.

P.S. (I have always wanted to get a 16X burner however I heard rumors that you risk getting a coster or bad results, if anyone can verify this rumor or disprove it, it would be greatly appericated!)

True. Burn at 4x max. Read the Golden Rules of Burning in my signature.

Regards