Right, I swapped out my old Pioneer 4x DVDRW earlier this year in favour of a BenQ DW1670. For a longer period of time I've noticed that my burns at 16x are taking too long, in fact it takes around 6:20 to complete a full single layer DVD at 16x. So, I installed ImgBurn, which shows real-time burn speeds and I noticed that the speeds fluctuates heavily. It starts off at 7.8x or so, then slowly climbs it's way up, which is all fine. But now and then it drops down to around 5x, and the unit cache drops to around 10%, it then quickly speeds up again to where it left. This seems to happen at the same places - always. I've tried 3 types of media, and I'm currently using Verbatim 16x discs. I've also updated to the newest firmware, and reformatted my PC. I've tried burning off both my raid 0 array and from my storage drives, and all drives are newly defragged.

I may also add that the discs seem to work ok-ish. My standalone DVD player has no problems reading the discs, but it's a very good reader. My parents LG player has problems with burns made on Epro discs, but I have not yet tried the Verbatim burns on that player. The Epro's work fine on the LG when they're burned with my Pioneer 4x unit.

The fact that it always seems to happen on the same spots, leads me to beleive that there's something going on with the burner.

Any tips or suggestions are greatly appreciated.