3000 N100 DVD Burner Burns too SLOOOOW!

[ParatoOptimal]

I'm running Ubuntu and ImgBurn through Wine.
My internal DVDRW rips music CDs and movie DVDs fine.
It used to write fine.
I set ImgBurn to burn at 8x but it's burning at 0.1x which takes over 9 hours.

[ParatoOptimal]

I connected an external burner and it worked fine for a few burns.
A day or two later, the external burner dropped to incredibly slow 0.1x burns.
There's some sort of I/O problem but I don't know how to find it or what to do.

I've been reduced to ripping on my 3000 via int's internal optical drive and then transferring the data to a thumbdrive which I connect to a Toughbook Pentium-M and burn via the same external burner.