Problem with my Plextor PX-716A...

[nin96932]

So this just started happening last night when I was trying to burn a couple of DVD's with Imgburn.

Just as it starts to burn and the Device Buffer starts to fill up, it starts freaking out. It'll load all the way up to 100%, then drop down to 73% then 54%, etc down to 0% then work it's way back up to 100% and then start it all over again. Goes from 0 to 100 back to 0% in about 1-2 seconds and just keeps repeating it.

It'll only burn my discs at a speed of 1.6x, so it's taking like 35 minutes to complete one and then if I want to verify it, it will only verify at 1.6x too.

I thought it might be the program at first, so I re-installed it and the same thing happened. So I made sure I had the latest firmware for it and I did(v1.10). I then de-fragged my hard drive just to make sure and it was still doing it. So I tried to use Nero to burn a DVD and it was doing the same damn thing.

I'm just curious if this means my drive is going bad or what. I'm using Verbatim DVD-R discs, which I've never had a problem with.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Brian.

[setarip_old]

Sounds like your burner (or another drive) is in PIO mode rather than DMA mode.Check in the Control Panel>>"Device Manager">>"System">>"Hardware">>"IDE Controllers" to see if this is the case.

If so, in the Device Manager (via the Control Panel>>System>>Hardware>>Device Manager), you simply have to remove the applicable IDE channel (Click on "IDE...Controllers") and let your computer reset it to DMA as follows:
Right click on the pertinent channel in Device Manager
Click on uninstall
Reboot
After rebooting go back to Device Manager and change the setting to "DMA if available"...

[Video Dude]

Just to add ...

If you have an Intel chipset, with the Intel storage drivers/application installed (ie Intel Application Accelerator), you will not have the DMA settings available to view or change.



I'm just curious if this means my drive is going bad or what. I'm using Verbatim DVD-R discs, which I've never had a problem with.
If Windows experiences repeated problems with the DMA enabled, it will automatically change to PIO.

[nin96932]

Well doing the uninstalling thing actually worked just fine thank you very much.

So what exactly is PIO anyways?

[neuron2]

Read this:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/ide/modes.html

Scroll down past the table of contents. Or read it all. :)

Extract:

"As I mentioned, programmed I/O is performed by the system CPU; the system processor is responsible for executing the instructions that transfer the data to and from the drive, using special I/O locations. This technique works fine for slow devices like keyboards and modems, but for performance components like hard disks it causes performance issues. Not only does PIO involved a lot of wasteful overhead, the CPU is "distracted" from its ordinary work whenever a hard disk read or write is needed. This means that using PIO is ideally suited for lower-performance applications and single tasking. It also means that the more data the system must transfer, the more the CPU gets bogged down. As hard disk transfer rates continue to increase, the load on the CPU would have continued to grow. This is the other key reason why PIO modes are no longer used on new systems, having been replaced by DMA modes, and then later, Ultra DMA."

[setarip_old]

Well doing the uninstalling thing actually worked just fine thank you very much.Glad to hear it resolved your problem ;>}