Thinkpads Forum

Hi everybody

I've got the following problem with my z60m, M a t s u s h i t a DVD RAM.

When I burn a data dvd with nero, it takes about 2 hours until it's complete. I guess the reason is that the drive buffer level goes up to 100% and then drops to 0, all the time. All this despite Nero process using 3% of cpu and no other programs active.

Also, burning process slows down everything so much, that I practically cannot do anything else.

In power manager, DVD speed is set to normal (not 'silent').

Thank's very much forn any suggestions

Have you made note of this:

- What's your HDD's RPM (4200, 5400, 7200) ???
- Have you tried burning from a external disc, let's say a USB 2.0 enclosure case to see if the buffer still empties.
- Have you checked your lappy for viruses?
- Have you defagmented your HDD?
- Tried again, reinstalled Windows?

This is error is mostly because the HDD is so fragmented, that it takes ages to re-buffer again all the data and transfer it synchronically to the drive. Where a lack of info is detected, the HDD is seeking like crazy the other fragments of the files being burned. And it takes some time before the new data being collected by the buffer to be transferred again to the DVD disc.

Check the options above

Verify that the drive is working in DMA mode. If it is working in PIO mode, that will slow things down a lot. To check, go to: Start > Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager. Check that under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, the Secondary IDE channel is set to DMA mode. Normally both the Primary and Secondary channels should be set to DMA mode. I am assuming here that the DVD drive is hooked up to the Secondary Channel. It is possible I suppose that it could be hooked up to the Primary IDE channel. I am not exactly sure how the SATA hard drives are handled in the newer ThinkPads.