Hello,

I bought a liteon 52x cdrw drive but when I tried to write at the max speed with Nero, the LED light just switching between red and orange throughtout the burning process.( The buffer just decreased to 10% from 100% and wnet back to 100% and so on.....) The DMA is on, the media is FujiFilm 48X, I tried to decrease the write speed to 20x and the buffer stayed @ 100% and the light stayed on red. Why?? Is that because my PII-400 with 128mb ram is too weak to keep the liteon to write at full speed?

If the buffer is fluctuating, your data stream is too slow. This can be due to DMA, hard drive problems, or just crappy IDE controllers. Your rig *should* be able to burn 48x, but not if you're converting audio on the fly, CD-to-CD copying, or some other task is running.

It can be your harddrive that's to slow.

In Nero try a burn where you Testburn and Determine maximum speed.

In "File/Preferences/Cache/Test all drivespeed" you can check your Harddrive performance.

According LiteOn the specifications:

System Requirement :
CPU Pentium 166MHz or faster, 128MB DRAM required
HDD must have access time < 20ms, with a minimum of 100MB Free space.

If you can burn at 20x without Smartburn kicking in, you have dma enabled.

Thanks for replies.