I recently did the Kyphermedia to 822A upgrade and I am quite happy with owning a dual drive! Anywho, this problem has been happening even before doing the firmware upgrade. My optical setup includes a Creative 16X DVD-ROM, Sony DRU-510A, and 2x BenQ 822A's. The first two are on the same ribbon and the last two are on their own. I've been using Memorex 4x DVD+R's which used to work perfectly fine in the Sony, but now both BenQ's and Sony are burning no higher than 1x no matter what setting it's on. Could it because I overloaded my cpu/memory with 3 dvd burners in one computer? BTW, this is my burning rig so I will do what I need to get it working properly.

System specs:
2x 256mb Kingston DDR
Athlon 2000+ XP
Soyo SY-K7VME Motherboard (micro-atx)
Firewiredirect ATA100/Raid/Firewire host controller (PCI)

Maybe my computer is taxed too much? If that's the case, it still is this slow when I'm only using one drive. Please help!

is DMA enabled ?.

Oaky, thanks for the reply. I did some forum searching after posting and saw the plethora of DMA-type problems. I'm sure that's the culprit. What I just did was take all 4 optical drives and put them on my mobos 2 channels and then put my 3 hard drives on the pci ide promise card. Burned one dvd with the benq and got 8x (yipee!). Tried burning on both benq's on the same ribbon at the same time and saw that my speed slowed down to about 3x-6x each. Is this a bandwith issue? One drive can't really be slowing down the other since it's on the same ribbon. I then added the sony 4x to the mix to have 3 burners at once and that one is going at 4x perfectly fine. I guess this leads me to the conclusion that the "halving" of the speed is normal, but is there any way to bypass this? Should I put each optical on it's on channel shared with a hard drive?

BTW, all the burners say that they are running under DMA Mode 2 so maybe that's what's limiting the burn speed? I just realized that I could go into my ide card bios by hitting ctrl+h and changing the settings which could have possibl remedied the optical drives problems earlier I was having assuming it was on PIO (sp?). At least in the ide card I can manually change the DMA up to mode 5.

Can anybody comment on how come this "halving" occurs? Should I buy another pci ide card based on this silicon chipset and put all 4 drives on their own cable?