Multiple Writers= SLOW

Check the IDE controllers in device manager to ensure that they are running in DMA mode not PIO. I know that the drives are SATA but they run in IDE mode.

what are you using to burn? is it just an ISO image?

yes, maybe it is your "hardriver"... but the burners are not really designed to DO that...

Hmm. It is weird. Im actualy not copying the same files on the different drives. They are video tutorials and they take so much space, so each chapter is on different dvds

My components are brand new, i bought em in august. Its a western digital caviar 250gb sata.

You really think it might be the hardrive not supplying the information fast enough for the burners?

What about the ram, is there any information that goes through the ram when the dvds are being burnt?

What about running 2 hard drive in RAID mode, will it help?

There shouldn't actually be a slowdown, the hard drive (assuming Nero is being used) writes the data once into memory, then that is the cache from which the three writers take their data, so the hard drive doesn't have to "read three times." I do think that one writer may be incompatible with the others, the Pioneer is a different Oem from the LGs, so try with just the LG writers to see if they take six minutes. I also have a multiple burner config, using four Pioneer 112/212d, and they write at the full 8X used by the Taiyo-Yuden media.

Oh, important point, make sure the sata ports used for the writers are all IDE and/or Enhanced ATA. If one writer is on IDE then another is on AHCI (which doesn't support DVDroms) then indeed there can be strangeness. Even one writer on AHCI-enabled Sata can fail. Maybe one writer is not working properly so it is keeping the others waiting??

Check in the BIOS, usually under "Chipset." That may be the whole issue.

Let's see how much Data the Burners are writing:

1x ~ 1385kibibyte per second
16x ~ 22160kibibyte per second
3x 16x ~ 66480kibibyte per second

66480kibibyte * 1024 * 8 = 544604160bit per second

544604160bit / 10^6 ~ 545mbit per second

545mbit / 8 ~ 68mb per second

A drive that can sustain 68mb per second while seeking data for 3 burners is needed.


These numbers are based on the effective write speed and thus don't contain overhead (communication, buffering, error correction etc.) and compression.

Under the assumption that you have a IDE HDD running at full 100mb (purely theoretical), the DVD Burners could be saturated quite easily.

If you do burn a DVD at 16x and task your HDD with searching a file or some other work, it may not be able to feed enough data to a single Burner (unless it cached whatever you are burning into your RAM) - if it is an older HDD. Since you burn different files on each Burner the HDD is busy seeking and can't feed data with full speed. All under the assumption that you use a single HDD.
The picture changes a little by using a SATA 150mb HDD but probably not enough to supply 3 Burners.

Here´s a little chart i found on THG showing some bandwidth data.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] page9.html
As you can see, most drives can easily feed 68MB per second at max speed. What you need to look for is the minimum speed though. None of the drives can deliver what you need. Under perfect conditions the fastest of them might work but i really doubt that.

What you have to do now is to find where exactly the bottleneck is. It seems easy to blame a slow HDD but that may not be enough. If you connect all your burners to your mainboards PATA controler, you may be creating another bottleneck. The controller can only supply a limited set of information (the newest ATA norm makes it 133MB) which should be enough but doesn't have to be enough if it is using a different standard and is poorly implemented.

I think the fact that you burn 3 dvd with different content is creating this problem. The HDD has to seek different data for all three drives and thus can't fill it's bandwidth proberly since it's seeking all the time.


First you should test if it is really the HDD. Borrow an external drive or a large Flash memory module. Copy the files you want to burn on that medium and burn two DVDs at max speed using the HDD as a source for one burner and the other medium as a source for the second burner. If things go smoothly, a second hdd, RAID 0 or not, will do you a big favor.

If that's the case make a RAID 0. The seek times won't improve but two HDDs have an easier time filling the Burners buffers since they have a lot more bandwidth. That will increase throughput quite a bit. In addition make sure your HDD is cleaned up. Defragment it.

While the SATA bus can feed 150mb that does not mean your HDD can feed that much data. Even with a RAID 0 you might end up with your three burners running at 12x each.

Actually this is quite offensive. You are making a claim without any supporting facts. That's what kids do.

But let's see.

Yes the data is cached to the memory but you can't cache the amount of 3 DVDs to memory and thus only a small portion is read to it. To sustain the cache the data has to be constantly refreshed and thus read from the HDD. And voilá we´re back to bandwidth. I left that part out because it doesn't really matter.

Given your childish and offending response i'm a forgiving person and all for learning new things, so please educate me.

That's what i thought at first too, but he said he's using the Nero Data Wizard which should just add the files to the DVD without actually encoding them.
I`m not certain that even if he had to encode the videos, wouldn't nero encode them first and burn them afterwards?

And i do believe you. But as you said you are burning the same DVD on all drives. Try burning different DVDs on all drives and see what happens. That is what the OP does and that is what is causing the problem.

Yes, he said that in his third and fourth post, which I didn't notice. I thought he was making multiple copies for distribution. Obviously he is therefore working from scratch three times over, and burning directly from a folder takes much more resources than just burning from a formatted ISO. In other words he's dragging and dropping then burning, and meanwhile moving on to the next set of files, each having to have ISOs created on the fly. Of COURSE that's slow!! I didn't see that, sorry.

No Answer, But out of curiiosity I tried burning 2 DVD+Rs.

initially, concurred with Slobogob and that still may be part of the problem.

Does not seeam to be CPU bottleneck nor limited by 2 Gigs of ram, as My CPU usage is less than 10% and avaliable ram is 1.2 Gigs.
Test:
Configuration: Plextor 755 and Samsung 183L. Both sata drives on jmicron controller.

2 WD SataII Raid 0 drives Plus 2 Segate SataII Raid 0 drives on Intel controller.

Disk -> Phillips +16 DVD+R
Files -> 4.35 gig Dvd movie Copied via Dvd shrink. Placed folder on both pairs of HDDs.

Result Very slow burn ie About an hour vs doing one in about 8 min. (only 55% complete after 30 mins)

As said, try burning three of the same DVDs and see if times go down. Another option is to burn three master copies and then just copy each as you need it.

I never used DVD shrink so i can not tell if the software somehow causes this. If DVD shrink creates an image and burns that image to the DVD and does so twice at the same time, that would create a terrible slowdown. But as i said, i don't know how DVD shrink works.

That's exactly what i`m talking about. Even if things go perfectly without reading AND writing to the same drive, there are three streams being read. If the caching is happening on the same hdd, as you pointed out, it is even worse.

Just a shot in the dark: maybe there's not enough RAM and the system swaps to virtual memory like crazy?

What program did you use to get the files on the DVDs then?

This may sound stupid but you did check the box with the "multiple burners" option, right?
Did you burn it as a video file on a DATA dvd or as a video on a DVD?

The cache on the hd is not that important. It makes sure the data is not totally scattered on the harddrive and, in case it's a whole lot of small file, bundles it. It makes sure Nero has a smooth start, so to speak.

The only way i found to get the multiple burners option was using NeroBurningROM. Don't use the wizard or NeroExpress. You will see the Option on the last screen where you can select "shut down after burning" and "verify files". If you don't know how to start NeroburningRom just browse the nero installation folder for a file with the same name.



I found another thread on this forum but it isn't of much help. Maybe i oversaw something so here it is:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/foru [...] -dvds-once

Thank you. I'm not without error though.

NeroBurningROM should work for both DVD and CD. You should be able to switch it from CD to DVD and the other way around. Just select "File" and "New". Somewhere on the upper left you can change the disc type.

Here´s a screenshot:

In the upper left corner you should be able to switch between CD and DVD.

Well, it seems that your not really familiar with how cache works, it doesnt need to send the entire image to main memory. Have you ever burned a DVD before? Are you aware that it doesnt even get to 16x transfer rates until the very end of the disk? Using your numbers you seem to think the entire disk is burned at 16x... quite illogical. In fact choosing a 16x rate will only average ~12x.

Back
Don't forget, this thread is about a solution - which means Identifing the problem.

I don't write multiple Dvds at the same time, I' only in this for education.

Skittle - I DO understand rotational speed vs angular velocity. And rated 16x is only on the outer edges where angular velocity is greatest.
Personally, I don't use 16x. Perfer quality.
I don't think your comments to slobogob where warrented, nor did it provide any usefull info.


The Dvds on my system are configured properly, as both will write at max 16X no problem.

- I ruled out using multiple Hard drives as a primary cause/solution. Although, I believe it would help.

- It is not a question of memory, nor CPU, as CPU utilization is low and task manager shows 1.2 Gigs memory still free.

This leads me to think that it is:
- Poor implimentation of the sata/raid (Two pair of raid 0 HDDs on my system). Could be ruled out by using a 3rd paty Raid card, Which I'm not planning on buying just to satify my quest for knowlege.
- Program (Nero) related. This could be checked by the OP using a different software package. Nero uses a HDD cache that is the same Drive/folder for multiple instances of nero running.

A good first step to make sure of that before testing. I hope you don't mind if i use your post as a basis to summarize the testing and add details mentioned in earlier posts?

Based on what is happening i agree. It looks less like a HDD issue and more like a software problem.

I summarize. Correct me if i'm wrong:

(RetiredChief)

• The systems CPU and memory usage were low. CPU usage was ~10% using an overclocked C2D E6400 @ 3.2 GHz.
• The operating system used was Windows XP. Or did you use VISTA?
• The SATA Burners used were a Plextor 755 and Samsung 183L. Both sata drives are connected to an onboard jmicron controller. Both drives operate properly at 16X if used alone.
• The Source Files were located on a RAID0 array connected to an onboard Intel controller.
• The data used for burning were video files. They were burned as files and not re-encoded.
• The software used to burn the DATA was Nero Burning ROM 7. The DATA DVD Wizard was used.
• The time for burning a single DVD with 4.3GB of data at 16x speed went from ~6 min. to ~60min. if two DVD burners were used. The data burned to both DVDs was the same but came from 2 differen RAID 0 arrays, both connected to an Intel controller.

(eband00)

• The system used was a C2Q 6600 with 2GB of RAM.
• The operating system used was Windows XP. (?)
• The burners were 2 LGs and 1 pioneer connected to an onboard SATA controller.
• The source files were located on a single WD Caviar 250GB connected to an onboard SATA controller.
• The data used for burning were video files. They were burned as files and not re-encoded.
• The software used to burn the DATA was Nero Burning ROM (Version?). The DATA DVD Wizard was used.
• The time for burning three DVDs at the same time went from ~6min. to ~40 min. using different video files supplied from a single HDD.

A few additional infos about Nero.
Nero uses a RAM buffer of max. 80MB. The secondary buffer on the HD is usually only used for files from other DVD/CD drives.

Informations we need are:
A rough estimate of your HDDs bandwidth would help. This tool should suffice. Just don't touch the write test. http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dlhdspeed.html As an alternative you can use Neros build in test.
Knowing Eband00s Mainboard and how the drives are connected would help.

How fragmented are your harddrives? Are they a mess or tidy clean?

Now the good part. Nero has a "simulate" option that, as i've read, does simulate the whole operation but doesn't calibrate the laser so no data is written. Everything else is like the real thing.
For the sake of comparison and better understanding i would suggest using NeroBurningROM and not the DATA wizard. I can't really see what the wizard is doing and that information is important right now.

I will write down the steps of it. It's not because i doubt you can't do it, but because i want to make sure we all do it the same way. Thats is better for comparison.

First, fire up NeroBurningROM. Click "File", select "New" and then select DVD-ISO.
Hit the "new" button. Fill the Disc with video-files you want to burn. Roughly 4GB of data should suffice.
Select "Recorder" in the menu and then "Burn Compilation". You should get to a window looking like this and hit the "simulate" button.



The catch is, to simulate you need a DVD-R not a DVD+R. Nero can't simulate DVD burning with DVD+. Multiple standards be cursed! If you can't run the simulation, uncheck it and run the maximum speed. Post the results.

When burning multiple different disks, I've seen a similar slowdown. In my case, the write program correctly buffered data at the beginning of the burn, but the program either wasn't fetching new data fast enough, or the hard drive was incapable of delivering new data fast enough to keep up with the burners. As soon as I split the data across multiple hard drives, everything became great again. I was using IDE drives at the time, however. I don't know how collisions and how the IDE channel needs a device to completely own the channel during data transfer would have hurt things either.

It's been my assumption that the hard drive was incapable of keeping up with the burners for some reason. So, we know that each individual DVD drive can burn just fine at 16X. However, two DVD drives could not burn simultaneously at 16x if I understood things. Maybe see if the three drives can burn at a combined speed of about 16-24x, such as each drive at 8x (or 6X if you have that setting)?

It could also be that the burning program is stupid, and it wasn't reading large blocks at a time for caching. If it's only reading 32k at a time, that's a lot of seeking it needs to do. It might be worth the trouble to see how fragmented the files you want to burn are, though I suspect that would only marginally improve the situation if the hard drive can't deliver enough data.

I've burned three DVD at 16x without any problems several times, but I had each burner fed from a its own hard disk. Could you try borrowing a hard drive form someone? Even an external should be able to feed a burner at 16x.