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[Solomon]

I've just installed a new Lite-On DVD/CD-RW internal combo drive in my system (SOHC-5232K, which is a 52X32X52X + 16X Combo Drive).  My system (don't laugh) is a Pentium-233 running XP Home Edition.

It seems that with MC 10.0.161 I can only rip at 0.5x, and burn speed appears to be about 4x, maybe 8x at the most.  I was expecting much faster speeds.  Any suggestions?  Is this drive supported by MC?  Do I need to download new firmware or install any drivers?

Solomon

[Robert Taylor]

A Pentium 233? With XP (Home or Pro) ?

You gotta be kidding! How much RAM do you have?

I wouldn't expect this machine to be fast at anything!

It may be worth flashing your CDRW to the latest firmware anyway, but with a machine like that, you may be asking a lot of it...

[Solomon]

I said not to laugh!  And no, this machine is not fast at anything.  But I would hope the speed of the CPU would not affect the speed of the CD drive.

It's running XP home edition, and has 160Mb of RAM.

I've tried flashing the drive firmware to see what happens.  Rebooting right now.  If anything changes, I'll let you know.

By the way, the drive's documentation says they strongly recommend setting the drive to Master instead of Slave.  I can't figure out why that should make a difference, but I'm in the process of shuffling things around (two hard drives) to try to make that happen, and so I'll see if that helps too.

[Robert Taylor]

Do you have the CDRW on the same IDE interface as one of your hard drives?

My policy is to always keep (where possible) CD's on the secondary IDE port, and keep hard drives together on the primary IDE port. I try never to mix them on the one IDE controller.

160Mb is quite a small amount of RAM to be working with. I wouldn't even try and run an XP based machine with anything less than 256Mb (obviously, it will work with less, but the system has to do more swapping, meaning more disk activity etc etc).

As far as the CPU speed affecting the CD speed, when ripping or burning, we're not just talking about raw CD drive speed, there's a lot else that happens which definately WILL be affected by CPU speed (and other factors like lack of RAM, FSB speed on your motherboard, etc etc.)

[Solomon]

Right now, the CDRW is on one IDE channel and the sole internal hard drive is on the other IDE channel.  The disk with all my music on it is an external drive on the USB port.

Not sure what to do...  I may return the drive to the store because my machine is within spec for the drive.  Ah well.

Solomon

[Robert Taylor]

Dude,

I have as my server machine an AMD Athlon 2500XP+ / 512Mb of DDR RAM / XP Pro which I run MC 10.1.173 on. It is my Media Server. It has a Pioneer 4X DVD/RW drive.

When I rip on that machine, I get around 15X rip speed (bit slow as DVD/RW drive is not the fastest at reading CD).

I don't think your CD drive will be the culprit in your case. I suspect that your machine is just not up to the task.

When you say "the machine is within spec for the drive", I take it you mean the system requirements listed on the box the CDRW came in. In my book, this means that it will WORK with that machine, but reading and writing CD's at the listed speeds depends as much on the other components which house the drive, as the abilities of the drive itself.

Is there no chance of upgrading/replacing your machine? That's what I'd be doing...

[hit_ny]

I've just installed a new Lite-On DVD/CD-RW internal combo drive in my system (SOHC-5232K, which is a 52X32X52X + 16X Combo Drive).  My system (don't laugh) is a Pentium-233 running XP Home Edition.

It seems that with MC 10.0.161 I can only rip at 0.5x, and burn speed appears to be about 4x, maybe 8x at the most.  I was expecting much faster speeds.  Any suggestions?  Is this drive supported by MC?  Do I need to download new firmware or install any drivers?

Solomon

Did you make sure your CD-Drive is set to use UltraDMA and not PIO (look under the drives properties) ?

Try another burning program like nero or a ripping program like EAC,  are the speeds comparable to what you see in MC or faster ?

If the speeds are the same then i'm afraid it might be upgrade time.

[Robert Taylor]

It just occurred to me that your ripping options might be to blame.

If you have MC's options set to rip and encode simultaneously, then the apparent rip speed is very slow. I just did some testing.

I have set MC up as follows:

Under Tools / Options / Devices, click the Advanced Ripping Settings button.

• Untick Encode on the fly
• Set Max concurrent ripping processes to 1
• Set Max concurrent encoding processes to 1
• Set max combined concurrent processes to 2

Under Tools / Options / Encoding

• Tick Normalise

Try these settings, you'll find that the actual ripping process is quicker, as all ripping is done one after another, while encoding happens "in the background". Be aware that the encoding process is probably what's flogging your machine, and this is not really going to help with that. But you will see faster ripping speeds.

See what you think.

Cheers
Rob