Q: I have a 7200 rpm IDE drive (Seagate Barracuda IV), with two partitions. The second partition (the last of the 20GB drive) is formatted FAT32.
I now have a GSA-4160B Goldstar DVD burner, and I write DVDs at 4x (sometimes 8x) 0.
The problem is: a short time after the writing , I want to start other programs, it takes a long time, and then the DVD buffer jumps down to 12% in some places, and the buffer used by the writing program depletes.
What would be the best way to improve access to the disk? Options are: 1 977 503. convert to NTFS partition (FAT32) 977.503 2. Adding another IDE drive
3. PCI SATA controller and SATA drive
4. SCSI controller and drive
Feel free to come up with other ideas
Re:Ok, I guess the next thing to check then is if they are in DMA or PIO mode. The easiest way I think is to go to system properties/hardware/Device manager. Open the IDE controller section and then right click on the primary or secondary channel. Click properties and then advanced settings. All devies should be in some DMA mode, if not, they should be changed to be so.
Beyond this, I'm starting to run out of ideas, but we'll see.
Re:They are on different cables, on one cable is a master hard drive (the boot drive) and a ASUS CDRW, on the other is the DVD writer
Re:Any idea if both the hard drive and the DVD are on the same cable? IDE can only access 1 device on a cable at a time, if both are on one channel you are most likely going to have trouble. Especially if you are writing to the DVD from the HD, while trying to do something else using the hard drive.(it doesn't matter how many partitions you have on the HD)
If this is the case, both need to be on separate IDE channels (i.e. cables), and this may help things alot. If you can't do this, and this is the problem, you are probably stuck, unless you stick in a PCI add-in card with another HD and burn from it.
Re:Pentium4 2.4 Northwood 533MHz bus, on an Intel chipset (Gigabyte GA-8PE667 mainboard), with 512MB single channel memory (2 sticks)
Re:How much ram do you have and what cpu are you using? Insufficient ram will lead to disk-swapping, and a slower cpu may have difficulty with multi-tasking resource hungry apps.
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