Only burning and Ripping at 1.2X

[teberly]

I have a bit of a problem. I have a Philips DR28 DVD+R that comes from Dell. Its in an Athlon XP 2000 PC with Win XP. The drive has suddenly decided that it will only rip and burn at 1.2X. It used to rip at 5x and burn at 2.4X. I use DVD Decrptor to rip and Nero to burn and it still says 2.4X, but it takes 55 mins instead of the normal 27 mins. During the burn process the buffer indicator fluctuates all over the place - which is also a new problem.

A couple of days before this started I upgraded to a new hard drive, Maxtor 120 gig, ATA 133, 7200 RPM with 2MB cache - but I burned and ripped with no problem the day after I installed the hard drive.

It seems odd that the DVD+R drive would be burning and ripping slowly, if there were a problem with the drive one would expect it to not burn at all.

Any thoughts?

[gooki]

Is you DVD writer set to PIA or DMA mode?

[Fox Mulder]

Yes, could be a busmaster issue.

[Tano]

Make sure all your drives including the Hard drive (yes that could also be the bottleneck) are set to DMA (or ultra DMA) mode. PIO mode is very slow (~16mbps) and will cause the dvd burner to transfer data at a lower speed.