Please help with this! My Liteon 1633s, in a Plumax USB2/Firewire enclosure is burning Verbatim +R (MCC 003) at 2.68x!!! (Nero Create Data Disk test). When I burned a data disk (3.7 GB) with this media it said it burned at 8x but took 20 minutes.
It burned a Memorex -R (CMC MAG.E1) at 4x. Nero disk info said the write speeds for the verbatim are 8x 6x 4x, and the Memorex 6x 4x. CPU usage with the burned Verbatim inserted is 1x: 23%, 2x 43%, 4x: 79% 8x n/a
The firmware version of the burner is BSOK, “DMA on” both IDE channels
Nero Express version is 6.3.1.11. I have a notebook, Athlon XP-M 2200 processor (1658 MHZ), 768 MG memory, There's 1.88 GB of free space on my hard drive.
I changed the enclosure to an ADS Tech USB 2, but the speed did not improve. I'm going to try Pacific digital 8x external and internal drives to see if they burn at 8x because they are easily returnable locally. I'm going to the Tiger Direct outlet to see if they have off-the shelf better media. Is there any thing else I can do besides learn to wait?

i think you need at least 5 gig's of free hard drive space to burn.it must be loading a gig or something then burning it then doing it again,also it is on the firewire bus not the usb bus,that is how you are using it right ,as for dma that only matters on an internal drivers the ext. use the fw or usb so no ide needed
Bruce

@gwhatnow yeah Braynes has a point. If you are backing up a dvd, you have to have at least 5GB of free, preferably continuous harddrive space to burn the entire image on the HDD before burning to a disc. But if you are just backing up data already on your hdd, then you should be OK. You will be better off defragging your hdd often and, since you are going through the usb and/or firewire ports with burst rates of ~12mb(check that in nero cd-dvd-speed or with Kprobe>info>drive, scroll down to bottom), you should halt other activity(including as many background programs as possible) during a burn and plugging your notebook into the wall vs. off the battery would help. Expect a top speed of only 8x with a burn time around 9-10 minutes. I also burn with an external usb, and I am careful to create an ideal as possible burning environment or else I get what you got. Have you used Kprobe 2.4.2 @4x speed to scan your discs? Save the scan as a .png file by the diskette icon in the upper right corner and attach to a post with the 'manage attachments' button in the 'go advanced' reply window. So before you run out and spend $, try these suggestions and let us know how it went.

Thank you both for your responses. It occurred to me after I wrote up the problem that space might also be an issue, even for backing up data, as I was doing. There's so many variables it's easy to overlook something. Going away for the weekend but I'll check that out Sunday when I return. I only have a USB port on my laptop, but I got the dual case after reading posts about slower burning with a USB external, thinking that one day I'll get a firewire PC card. I tried Kprobe but had some questions because things didn't look the way they were in the posts (e.g. I don't see a graph for PO, just PI and PIF, the ADER didn't work), so I used Nero, intending to read up more on Kprobe later. The write test graphs were terrible, from what I understand of them at this point, but let's see what happens after I clear up some space. You're so right about the environment -- at first I tried to run write tests with Musicmatch and Navigator also open and things were so slow I had to reboot.

Update your version of Nero.

From here?
http://nero.com/us/nero6_3.html

it let me update from there
Bruce

No, you need Nero v6.6 from www.ahead.de

Also, verify that your USB port is a USB2 port. I jumped thru hoops trying to get a NEC2500 (in a USB Backpack enclosure) to burn with any speed, only to find that the 12-month old IBM computer that it was attached to did not support USB2. Popped a USB2 PCI card in, plugged the drive in, and blammo- it worked nice-nice. (This was after tweaking every other imaginable setting)

Also, fyi, I'll never do biz with TigerDirect again after a SNAFU they had with me. Their customer service is bar none, the worst I've ever dealt with, in any industry.

Live and learn-

-Blu

also remember that the usb controler has 2 or more ports must putters have 2 or 3 controler and 2 ports for each (4 or 6) in all to make it usb2 all the devices on the controler must be usb 2 or it will fall back to usb 1.1,

Blu a friend about 3 years ago brought 400 bucks worth of stuff from then they never sent the prosser(it was not even being made yet they took the order) they charged him 15 percent restocking fee for a part they never shiped as for c.s. lol there is none it took him going to the attery gen. off and filing a complant,when the refunded the cc they kept 15% restocking,they s--k

Bruce