Posted by Bob on 05/05/06 12:50

On Thu, 04 May 2006 10:45:05 -0700, Voinin <vboing@boing.biz> wrote:

>> Anyway, are you sure that UDMA33 is all that bad for the 3550? I would
>> not know since I have never put one on a slow computer.

>I had a motherboard with a chipset that would not support DMA66 or 100
>on the secondary channel. (I'm never gonna get another ECS motherboard,
>thank you!) When trying to burn 16X on that, I would get all kinds of
>buffer underrun situations, using a Pioneer A09XL drive. (No errors
>during the burn or verify, but the discs would have problems playing on
>the player hooked up to the TV.) So DMA33 is not good for burning at
>16X. I upgraded my motherboard and I didn't have buffer problems after
>that. But still the discs weren't not of the quality I wanted. So now
>I burn at 8X. It works much better that way.

>Which makes this whole discussion inconsequential in the long run. It's
>interesting, but in the end, I'm still burning at 8X even on the
>Pioneer. But I still want to know why they're producing DMA33 drives
>rated at 16X.

I looked up the spec on the 3540 on CDFreaks review and indeed the
burst mode is UDMA33. Yet I have never seen any buffer problems when I
used 16x. But then my mainboard supports UDMA133.

I will tell you that if I burn at 16x and try to run a foreground
process, I can cause the burn to go bad. That's why I burn only when I
am not using the machine for anything else.




--

"A politician's neck should always have a noose around it.
It keeps him upright."
-Robert Heinlein

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