i have a BenQ 1655 on the way and after burning hundreds of DVDs with my 1620 over the last year and a half, i want to be able to burn on the fly damnit

so im looking at a Sony G120A-B2 and i wonder if i would be better getting another BenQ or another brand or what?

The BenQ 1655 is the best burner that I know of and not a bad reader. I would still want a Liteon to read difficult disks.

But what is all this on the fly ? why buy the best burner and then burn on the fly ?

to cut copying time in half

and cut longevity by more than half

longevity?
if my bus isnt too congested how would burning on the fly reduce quality?
im running an Athlon 64 proc on an Asus A8N5E and all the hdd's are SATA so i have two dedicated IDE channels

If it works - fine. The extra time taken to rip to hard drive is minimal compared to the time taken by DVD Rebuilder - normally left to run over night - Perhaps Im just being too conservative but as on the fly only saves time and can not result in a better burn I think I'll give it a miss.

Tried on the fly with a liteon to a BenQ1620. Unfortunately a pentium 4 2.4 doesnot appear to be up to the job. it took 15 minutes to make a copy at 8X.

The scan attached - although acceptable - is the worst the 1620 has ever produced.

I have added a more normal scan - ripped to drive first - for comparison purposes

Looks like you really do need a powerful set up.

ok but are the drives on dedicated ide cables?
the P4 matters much less than the ide setup
ive tried burning on the fly before and i never got any acceptable results because i didnt have these sata hdds at that time

i really appreciate you running the test for me though
you may very well be talking me out of getting the lite-on

In this PC both drives on one channel with the hard drive using the other channel. Using nero I found that the top buffer remained at about 50% and the lower buffer fluctuated madly.

I do have other machines - one with sata but nero not loaded - so that is why I used the older machine. when I get time I will install Nero and try again on the P4 3.2 2 sata drives BenQ1655 and Liteon 1693S. One this machine each burner is on its own channel.

Harry,
It's been over 6 months since I tested copy-on-the-fly, if I remember right I used an nec 3520 as reader(It'll rip a burned disk in 5 minutes) and my lg4163 as writter.
The key was the source disk, a 99QS mcc 004, at 16x between standalone masters
it took maybe 6 1/2 minutes? Lowly amd xp 2700. QS of burned disk was low 90's.
I never expected it to work and only tried one time.

Chewy

did you ever get around to running the test on the other comp?

Yes - the results , in scan terms, were better but still poor in comparison to a "normal" burn. I don't think the actual higher numbers matter in practical terms and I'm sure that I would get better results with 2 BenQs - The Liteon just can not deliver data fast enough.

As I said originally the time saved is not important to me. the quality of the burn is the most important factor. I can see how with the right equipment I could get
the same quality results but the time saved is only a few minutes at best.

no surprise. I find that every buffer underrun causes a PIF, and if you have the drives on the same channel... well...

thx much, ill just stick to the one drive i have