Major Plextor Problems

by **w12plai** on Mon Sep 15, 2003 11:21 am

I just purchased a Plextor 708A. I have an Athlon XP processor rated at 2600+ at 333 FSB. I have 768 MB of DDR 400 ram, and I have a 160 GB ATA 133 HD with 8 mb. of Cache. I have the Plextor on its own IDE Channel setup as the master, and I have the Hard Drive set up on its own IDE cable as a master. I have two other drives, but for convience purposes I took them out just to get this ghing working. I have a Gigabyte motherboard as well. For some reason both channels are set to multi word DMA which I hadnt heard of before, and it wont allow me to change. This is a KT 400 based motherboard by the way. At any rate, I have tried Verbatim 4x +R media, as well as Memorex 4x+ R media and the media that came in the box. No matter what, I can't get the burner to burn at 8x in either Nero or Roxio. In nero it starts of really really fast. and the used read buffer is at 100 percent. The other buffer stays at 91 % the first minute and a half and it stays on schedule. About a minute into the burn, it slows down considerably, to about 2.4 x the rest of the way out and it takes me about 18 minutes to burn a DVD. I have tried data, copies, and images. All the same. In Easy CD creator I get the same speed things. Their speed test says that I cannot do more than 2.4 x. When I do speed test in nero...it starts reading and sending data at 11x, and then drops quickly to 2.9 and 3.1x. I have defragmented as well. Can anyone tell me what is the problem and what can be effecting transfer speeds? I have also tried every possible configuration as well. I am in the process of upgrading firmware as well. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I really want this to work. I sent a message to tech support as well with no response as yet. Thank you in advance.

by **VEFF** on Mon Sep 15, 2003 11:53 am

I think the problem is indeed the "MultiWord" DMA, you probably need to somehow get Windows to recognize it as "Ultra DMA", since 8X DVD burning is about 10.8 MB/sec.

You don't happen to have the extra jumper on the 708A plugged in do you?
It is for DMA not Ultra DMA. You should remove the "DMA jumper", if it is hooked up.

Also check if your mobo has a transfer mode issue, and possibly an upgrade. I am just fishing here, but you never know...

I once had a similar problem right after upgrading the firmware on a CD burner that went to PIO. Windows does this sometimes.
I had to do a system restore to when the transfer mode was Multi Word
DMA, and all was fine again.

Good Luck!
Let us know what happens...

by **tazdevl** on Mon Sep 15, 2003 12:01 pm

Welcome to the forums.

Couple things, Nero and EasyCD don't get along well. You need to uninstall one or the other. Since I think Roxio bites the big one, I'd recommend uninstalling it.

There are issues with Nero version 60015 and the 708A. If you install the previous version, 60011, things should be fine.

Download and install the latest Via Hyperion motherboard chipset drivers.

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=300

If that doesn't work, try uninstalling them, rebooting, then only reinstalling the .INF and AGP driver. Don't install the IDE driver (uncheck), use the default windows IDE driver. Reboot.

Sounds like you're updating the BIOS on the motherboard which would be my next suggestion.

Hopefully you should be able change things to DMA after that in the Device Manager (IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers).

I'd bet it's a motherboard driver issue. I have a Canterwood based motherboard (Intel's latest chipset) and the drive didn't work correctly until I installed the latest chipset drivers.

I didn't see what OS you were using, including that will be helpful.

by **CDRecorder** on Mon Sep 15, 2003 12:33 pm

Also, make sure that UDMA is set to "Auto" for all drives in your BIOS. This could be causing the problem you're seeing.

BTW, Easy CD Creator (I use 5.3) and Nero (5.5.x) work just fine together in my experience. I don't think that we should blame this problem on Nero or Easy CD Creator yet.

by **MadBurner** on Mon Sep 15, 2003 2:32 pm

I've also been running Nero 6.0.0.15 and Roxio 6.1.1.17 without any problems. There use to be issues with them in older versions but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore based on my experience anyway

by **VEFF** on Mon Sep 15, 2003 4:39 pm

Just a word of warning:
Roxio 5 and 6 don't like Promise controller cards with CD/DVD devices attached. They hang.
Someone posted about the issue with Promise controllers and Roxio, when I posted about this hanging, which occurs on both my PCs when using Roxio.

by **MadBurner** on Mon Sep 15, 2003 7:38 pm

Thanks VEFF for the warning. I'm not currently running any Promise controllers so that would explain why I haven't had any problems thus far :wink:

by **aviationwiz** on Mon Sep 15, 2003 9:03 pm

VEFF wrote:Just a word of warning:
Roxio 5 and 6 don't like Promise controller cards with CD/DVD devices attached. They hang.
Someone posted about the issue with Promise controllers and Roxio, when I posted about this hanging, which occurs on both my PCs when using Roxio.

Intresting, I've got a Promise Chip, but it's not in use now, as all my HDD's are SATA, and all I have is 3 Optical Drives.

by **VEFF** on Mon Sep 15, 2003 10:49 pm

Yes, it is interesting.
I wish Roxio would fix it, since I have used a numberr of other burning programs without incident...

I never knew why it was hanging, until someone mentioned it in reply to a post on one of the forums here.
I will try temporarily disabling (in device manager only I mean) the CD/DVD drive(s) hooked up to the Promise card, just to confirm it.

by **Mik** on Tue Sep 16, 2003 12:58 pm

I don't know if this applies to you or not but I have a VIA KT333 based mobo and initially had trouble getting DMA mode to stick on my optical drives in Windows XP. Every time I would set them to dma, I'd reboot and they'd be back to pio mode 4. I fixed this by installing VIA's Bus Master IDE controller drivers. After that, dma worked just fine. I think this is the one: http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=340. You might want to give it a try too.

by **tazdevl** on Tue Sep 16, 2003 1:23 pm

Mik wrote:I don't know if this applies to you or not but I have a VIA KT333 based mobo and initially had trouble getting DMA mode to stick on my optical drives in Windows XP. Every time I would set them to dma, I'd reboot and they'd be back to pio mode 4. I fixed this by installing VIA's Bus Master IDE controller drivers. After that, dma worked just fine. I think this is the one: http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=340. You might want to give it a try too.

FYI better to use default MS IDe drviers. Via IDE drivers are well known for causing problems and corruption on many an occasion.

by **drakus** on Tue Sep 16, 2003 5:08 pm

I am now comfronting the same problem but in my case I got to record with TDK media at 8x. When I gave my board a BIOS update it says that is recordind at 8x but it takes 13 min to record de compleate DVD. It seems that its recording at 4x instead of 8x. I have a ABIT BD7 motherboard.

by **Mik** on Tue Sep 16, 2003 10:13 pm

The MS IDE drivers give me 100% cpu utilization when accessing my optical drives when burning, copying files, or whatever. Essentially my computer just about halts when using the drives with those drivers. That's entirely due to dma not enabling properly using those drivers. No problems at all with the Via drivers for me and I've been using them for about a year.

by **CityHunter** on Tue Sep 16, 2003 10:37 pm

I've ripped a couple of DVD movies and compressed them using DVD2One v1.2 and also v1.3. Whenever I try to burn them onto DVDs (using Nero), I always get this warning:

There has been a possible read error during the operation, which may result in a defective write. Do you with to continue the write anyway?

I also have TDK dual (NEC1300) and OptoRite DD0203, which never give me this kind of error before. What could be wrong?[/img]

by **drakus** on Wed Sep 17, 2003 8:34 am

I dont know what else to do its' imposible that at first I could write at 8x and now I cant. I think is the TDK media any suggestions???

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