whats up with my lite-on burner?

[Dropkick]

this think is a 40x and takes like 12 min to finish a burn. my puter is an AMD 1700+ with 512 DDR. the drive is a 40125S.
what is going on?

 

[Bacinator]

couple tings:
How fast is your motherboards ATA bus? 33/66/100/133?
Are you using a 40/80pin IDE cable for your lite-on, and if you can tell, what is the rated speed of the cable?
Is there a slower running device running on the same cable?
Do you have the proper DMA settings <control panel - system - hardware profiles - IDE controllers - properties> (with win xp, not sure about prior OS's)
Last thing, if you burning from a disc that is running off of the same IDE cable, you can easily see your perfromance drop by %50. Only one device on the cable talks at a time.

 

[Dropkick]

thanks for the response.
1) my mobo is ATA 100, but ever since i built it at bootup it says "searching for ATA devices" then a few moments later it says "ATA is not installed no devices found." i always wondered what i did wrong to cause this.

2) i think it's a 40-pin and whichever cable was sent with my case; but i think i remember they are rated at ATA100, im just not sure.

3) no other devices on same cable, and im burning from HD, not on-the-fly.

4) i tried to find where to adjust the DMA settings, but i couldnt with your directions. maybe somethings wrong?

Im running XP BTW.

 

[Bug]

Like Bacinator said: In XP, get to the Device Manager. Go to the IDE controllers, and confirm that both Devices listed under Secondary IDE Channel\Advanced Settings are set to "DMA if available". Will have to reboot afterwards if either was initially set to "PIO Mode".

 

[TheCorm]

Is there a slower running device running on the same cable?

Please remember the Anandtech FAQ's....this has not been an issue since the days of the 440LX motherboards!

I believe Lite-ON 40x burners are ATA66 rated but ATA33 is faster than any CD transfer rate nowadays anyway. So there is no point of having an 80 pin cable attached. All 40 pin cables I have encountered are ATA33 rated max, 80 pin cables are either ATA66, 100 or 133....if there is a difference.

Are you doing much with your system while it's burning....if you are using CPU intensive programs or doing hard disk related work then it will slow down the file transfer speeds and the burnproof will keep cutting in to prevent buffer underrun and it will be effectively burning at a much slow speed.

But the DMA thing is a good place to start.

Corm

 

[Bacinator]

Originally posted by: Dropkick
thanks for the response.
1) my mobo is ATA 100, but ever since i built it at bootup it says "searching for ATA devices" then a few moments later it says "ATA is not installed no devices found." i always wondered what i did wrong to cause this.

2) i think it's a 40-pin and whichever cable was sent with my case; but i think i remember they are rated at ATA100, im just not sure.

Im running XP BTW.

The only place you should see the "searching for ATA devices" is you you have a seperate IDE controller card installed, such as one that would come with a maxtor hard drive. If you do not have anything connected to it, it will not see anything. Can you tell us what it says at the top of the screen while it's searching. Something like "Promise TXXX Ultra ATA Controller". Also, if you go into your BIOS settings, does it recognize the drives there. If not, no hard drives, floppy, DVD drive, or any IDE device should function on your computer, which is obviosuly not the case.

Looking at the ribbon cable, does it look like it is 40 wires or 80 wires wide? 40 wire will look a bit thicker, and 80 will be very flat and thin.

 

[Amber]

I have seen the "searching for ATA devices" on BOOT UP with MOB's that have on board ATA/100 or RAID chanels, in a set-up that was only using the other IDE's ,so when you boot it looks @ the ATA/100 or RAID chanels finds them with no drives and then says controller BIOS loaded

The same as if you had a PCI ATA card with no drives on it (like "Bacinator" said)


are there 4 IDE chanels on this MOB and if you have 2 BLUE IDE's (ATA/100) you want to put your HDD on 1 and your CDRW on the other

I hope some of this helps