DVD burning going slooooooow Please HELP!

I just purchased an Aspire 1640 model 1641WLMi. Everything on it works great. When I went to burn my first DVD with it, it took 55mins to complete at 8X. I am using Sony 8X DVD-R's. I used the included NTI cd & DVD maker software the first time, so I then loaded NERO 6 and it took the same amount of time. I've checked the data rate on the HDD and its between 29.3-31.3 MB/sec so it can definitely supply at least the necessary 11,080 KB/sec required. I then checked the DVD writer with Nero's DVD & CD drive speed tool. On the write test it starts at 4X then proceeds to go all the way up to 8X. I dont know why it burns DVDs so slowly. I bought this specific model because of the 8x dvd writer and it only writes at less than 2x. I am running on AC power so its not a battery issue. Has anyone else run into this problem?? Thanks for your help.

 

What were you burning ? Any compression / decompression going on ? Anything else running on the Laptop stealing cycles ? Did you do a validate data after the burn ?

 

I was burning dvd-video files. There was no compression going on, they were all already in the correct format. All NTI/Nero had to do was burn it to the DVD. I had nothing else running except for the normal drivers that it starts up with such as the sound card, video, touchpad, wireless lan, etc that reside in the system tray. No, I didnt do a validate after burn, all it did was to just burn the disc, no write testing before and no validating afterward.

Even when I burn a music CD it goes slow. When I burned a 75 min audio CD it was supposed to burn at 24X, so it should have taken around 4 mins but it took around 8-9mins.

 

Might be a bad batch of Sony DVD's ? Try a different brand (me I have always had sucess with TDK and Verbatim)

Are you using the lastes patchset for Nero 6 as well ?

Also make sure DMA is enabled : http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=101616

 

Yes, I just downloaded the newest Nero 6, its version 6.6.1.4 I doubt it would be the software because I got the exact same results using the NTI software as with using Nero.

The Sony discs I bought are in a 25 count spindle and I've been using them on my desktop that has a 16X NEC writer and they burn great at 16X. I will pick up a different brand tomorrow and try them.

Yes, I checked and DMA is enabled and its using ultra DMA mode 2 for the DVD drive.

I know this has me totally lost as to why its burning so slowly. Someone else suggested maybe a new firmware but I can't figure out what brand the drive is, windows just lists it as a HL-DT-ST DVD-RW GWA-4082N. Do you know what brand that is or heard whether it is any good or not?

 

You can use DVD Identifier to find out who makes the discs and it is probably not Sony. Taiyo Yudens are considered to be the best blank discs, both CDs and DVDs. You might want to uninstall the ide drivers in device manager if you are comfortable. Windows should find and re-install it.

 

Try different media... I have no problem burning at 8X using Nero 7 with 8X Ritek media...

 

It is a LG drive. Generally, laptop drives don't get a lot of firmware support, but feel free to look. There are are probably some unofficial ones out there, but they will void the warranty. Be careful what you upgrade to. If it gets messed up, neither Acer or LG will help you. I have no idea if the drives are any good. Usually laptop drives are not as good as desktop drives. My personal favorite brand is NEC. Might want to look over at CDFreaks for some info. I think some good quality media like the Taiyo Yudens or Verbatims are your best course of action. Good Luck.

 

I'm going to try different media tonight after work. I have been reading on CDFreaks and found out that it is an LG and that LG wont write new firmware and ACER has no firmware listed on their driver update page. I've run diagnostic tests on my HDD and its not that, its a 5400 RPM drive and in HDTune it had a min of 20MB/sec and a max of 32MB/sec with an average of 28MB/sec. So its not like the HDD can't supply enough data for the writer to burn at 8X. When I run Nero CD/DVD Speed it performed the write test and it starts at 4X then proceeds up to 8X in a nice linear plot on the graph. My desktop dvd writer is an NEC 3520 and when I ran the same test on it, it starts at 7X and proceeds up to 16X in a nice linear plot also and it burns excellent so I'm assuming that is what a normal burn speed plot should look like. I've also used two different burning software, NTI (the one ACER included) and the newest Nero 6 and both gave identical burn times of 55mins. Its a brand new computer so there isn't anything installed on it to be eating up resources, just the necessary drivers for sound, graphics, touchpad, power management, quick start buttons, wireless lan. I've been using it on AC power so that should eliminate any power management issues. If the new media doesnt solve it I'm guessing its just a defect drive?? I'm totally stumped. I tried to contact ACER tech support and the only way I could do that is by email form on their website and I have yet to hear back from them after 3 days.

 

Definitely try different media. I have the LG GMA-4080N and have found various media incompatibilities. For example, the Memorex dual-layer (DL) DVD media doesn't work, some DVD-RAM brands are flaky, etc.

The Memorex DL media returned verification errors, for example. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and took them up on their warranty to replace the bad disks. Lo and behold... the same problem. Of course, this could also be a drive design or engineering issue, not a media issue, but I can only control one of those two variables...

I have had no problems with Verbatim DL media, and both HP's DVD+R's and TDK's CD-R's also work perfectly.

It is unfortunate that (as has been pointed out earlier in this thread) there aren't any firmware updates available from either Acer or LG for these notebook drives. I have an external Plextor drive that I bought to go with my previous laptop (which didn't have a built-in burner), and they released a number of updates to better accomodate various media.

Good luck!

Jonathan Harris
Current machine: Acer Travelmate 8104

 

Over the weekend, I tried several different brands of media. Sony, Verbatim, Memorex, TDK, and the generic Staples brand. Every one of them took 55 mins to burn a full DVD when set at 8x in the burning software.

I emailed Acer tech support last week and they replied with a message to call in on the phone. So I did that and all I get is a bunch of people that you cant understand telling me nothing is wrong, that its working properly. Obviously its not, it shouldn't take 55 mins to burn one DVD.

I'm totally whipped by this stupid little laptop. I've done everything I can think of and know to do. I've taken everybody's suggestions here, but nothing works. I guess the only thing left to do is to buy a new dvd drive and swap it out and see if that corrects the problem, if does then the drive is defective and if it doesnt then I dont know what the problem is, bad motherboard chipset or faulty drivers???

I've posted this question on about 5 other message boards and this message board by far has given me the best response, so thanks for everybody's help so far, keep your ideas coming.

 

Well I've tried everything I can think of and read every forum that I could find and the best guess answer I can come up with is the fact that my computer has the Intel 915 chipset which includes the ICH6 southbridge. It only supports one IDE channel. My laptop has the HDD as the primary master and the DVD writer as the primary slave. Even though when you test each device separately they both perform at the required level, when you try to burn and they have to operate simultaneously they have to share the single IDE channel and can only access it one device at a time. So this at least doubles the time required to burn a disc.

That to me explains some of the slow burning times. But if a dvd burned at 8x should take around 10mins then in this computer it should burn in about 20mins, not the 55mins that I am seeing, so something else is wrong too causing a huge slow down of the data being transferred from the HDD to the dvd writer. I still can't figure out what it is though.

I was reading in another post on this forum where other people were experiencing similar problems in the acer 1802 model laptops that have the same chipset. I guess this was a big engineering mistake by acer for not using a SATA HDD and an IDE dvd writer to maximize data flow. From everything that I read there is no way to switch the computer over to a SATA HDD either.

 

I have seen plenty of other notebooks using ide connections that burn fine. Perhaps the drive is just broken. It happens. How about running HD Tune on your hard drive to make sure it is working properly, a bios update if available or some different software like CDBurnerXP which is free.

 

I have updated the Bios in the laptop to the newest version available on the Acer website. They have no firmware updates available for the DVD writer. I have run HDTune on the HDD and everything was very good, I cant recall the exact #'s but they were something like 32MB/sec max, 28.8MB/sec avg, and 20MB/sec min. With a CPU utilization around 2-3%. I dont believe its the DVD writer being defective because the discs although they burn very slowly are burned accurately, and when I use NERO drive speed to test the capabilites of the DVD writer it reports that it starts at 4X and proceeds in a linear plot on the graph all the way up to a max of 8X just like its supposed to. Anyways I tried to remove the drive and purchase an brand new NEC drive and the DVD drive is not removable by the end user, it has to be sent in for service to have it removed, its locked in internally somehow. And after multiple telephone calls to ACER tech support they keep telling me the drive is "performing as its designed to." Even though its taking 55mins to burn one DVD when it should only be taking 8-10 mins. So they wont let me even send it in to them for any servicing under warranty.

Having a DVD writer and a HDD on the same IDE channel will cause it to burn more slowly because the IDE channel can only retrieve/supply data from one device at a time so it has to retrieve data from the HDD and buffer it then send it to the DVD writer to write it then retrieve more data from the HDD and so on its not a constant flow process such as if the IDE devices were on separate IDE channels.

 

As previously mentioned you have an LG super multi burner, you can find detailed information about the product here (click the specifications tab): http://www.lge.com/prodmodeldetail....ty_spec_id=&quality_spec_value=&pagePerNum=6#

Seems that as was mentioned earlier, notebook burners are much more limited then their desktop counter-parts.

Hope this helped