Have recently upgraded my aging 4x CD Writer to a new Cyberdrive 32x.

It used to take around 30 mins with the old writer to copy a full CD using CloneCd. With the new writer it now takes around 18 minutes with either CloneCd or Nero burning on-the-fly. I was expecting a much greater improvement in copying speed. Was I being too optimistic or should I be getting better results?

My system is running an AMD Duron 800 with 256mb Ram, Win98SE.

The Cyberdrive 32 x CD writer is set up as a slave to my CD-Rom drive which is a Samsung 48x. Both on the IDE2 connector.

My 2 hard drives are set up on the IDE1 connector.

Any advice would be welcome.

try updating mother board drivers!

Make sure DMA is enabled. What are you burning, audio, video, games, data, etc. Have you tried burning from the hard drive, maybe your CD ROM is not fast enough, particularly if you're burning audio? Provide more information.

Yes DMA must be selected for your burner or it will take 2 to 3 times as long to burn with the slower data rate. If you are burning data from your hard drive it should take less than 5 mins for 700mb. If you are burning on the fly from another CD it will take longer as they are sharing the same IDE port (also depends on how fast the reader is reading).
If you copy a disk image to your hard drive with Clone CD then burn that image, it should give you a true indication of how fast the burner is.

Thanks for these responses. DMA is now enabled on both drives, but my 48x CD-rom still takes around 10-12 minutes to read a full VCD disc and the 32x burner then takes around 8 minutes to burn the CDR (Nero indicates that it is burning at 32x).

I wonder if it could be the way I have the drives configured. Both CD drives are hooked up to IDE2, while my 2 hard drives are connected to IDE1.

Any further suggestions how I might improve my copying speed?

I'm not sure whether your saying you burned on the fly or from the hard drive. Ripping a VCD will take longer than for data, you are also performing file conversion while ripping. Burning will likewise take longer. Try burning some data files (even the .mpg) to a data CD (ISO-9660).

Also, what are the buffer levels showing when burning OTF in Nero? Does dropping your burn speed produce a faster time? Having your CD reader on the same IDE channel is not the ideal situation for OTF copying IMHO but it can still be done if your reader is upto it. I don't know the exact performance of your Samsung drive but you can check out the DAE and data extraction figures for it at www.cdspeed2000.com

I did use a lot of 52X Samsung drives in systems a while ago but found them to be awful for OTF burning even when the drive was connected as slave to the HDD with the CDRW as master on secondary IDE. Maybe a new reader will help the situation. I now fit LiteOn 52-6 CD-Rom drives as standard and have found them to be great all-rounders, they only cost around £22 (UK) too.


HTH :)