i recently bought a usb 2.0 fantom premiere 16x dvd burner, the problem being when i try to burn anything onto a dvd it starts off extremely slow 3x-ish (it will say burning started at 8x) and then about 25% through my buffer will start fluctuating wildly and it'l drop to 0.5-1x. taking 40 minutes-hour to burn a 4 gig dvd. I'm trying to burn from an a64 3200+ gig of 3200 ram and 2 raided 80 gig sata harddrives (raid 0) with usb 2.0 on windows xp. As far as i can tell theres no reason my buffer should be having problems and as i said above even before the buffer goes wonky its burning slow, anyone have any suggestions? i've tried burning with nero, sonic and dvd decrypter

EDIT: on a sidenote, i just ran nero drive info and for my internal drives it says autorun on, DMA on but for the usb it just says Autorun. DMA is set to on if available for everything in all my ide channels but the usb drive does not show up under either channel in the device manager like my internals do, do i have to do something special to enable dma on it?

maybe the usb you are using are 1.1 and not 2 so check the BIOS setting, some has manual enabler for 2 speed for usb2

Or, in fact, are you sure you have a USB 2.0 controller?

I just bought the LG 5163D external drive and burning with nero (bundled s/w) on usb2.0 port, same problem, buffer fluctuates like crazy even at the beginning, and it takes 75 minutes to burn a DVD-R ~4.5Gb of just normal data... tried 2, same results, actually the 2nd one took even longer...

1. is there a way to set DMA for usb2 external drives?
2. is there a way to check (via winXP home) is my mobo port is infact usb2 or usb1.1?
3. could it be that my system is too slow?

my system is:
Pentium Celeron 1.6Ghz
RAM 256 DDR something
HDD 60Gb not sure the speed
running on winXP home

Thanks.

Has anyone found a solution to this issue? It's driving me nuts! Burning at around 3x, marginally better reading...
WinXP Pro, Pentium M 1.5GHz, 512MB DDR, 40GB HDD, 160GB external HDD (no transfer issues with either firewire OR USB2).

General Information

Operating System Windows XP
Drive PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-109
Firmware Version 1.57
Serial Number EDDC507360WL
Disc DVD+R
MID CMC MAG E01
Capacity 4.38 GB

Transfer Rate

Start 4.90x
End 4.63x
Average 4.84x
Type CLV

Seek Times

Random 110 ms
1/3 132 ms
Full 225 ms

CPU Usage

1X 20 %
2X 39 %
4X 82 %
8X n/a

Interface

Burst Rate 7027 KB/sec

Spin Up/Down Times

Spin Up Time 0.00 sec
Spin Down Time 2.98 sec

Load/Eject Times

Load Time 14.02 sec
Eject Time 1.19 sec
Recognition Time 0.01 sec