[lug] DVD Burner Recommendations

[David Morris]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 10:01:20AM -0700, Gary Hodges wrote:
> I have a Sony DRU-510A installed, and what little I have used it, it has 
> worked fine.  One curious thing occurred a couple of weeks ago, but I 
> don't think it was an issue with the Sony.  I was making a copy of a DVD 
> with K3b, and while the disk was being copied as an image to the hard 
> drive, my computer ground to a crawl.  I couldn't do any work.  It took 
> minutes to open a Mozilla Mail window, and wasn't usable when it finally 
> did open.  I forget what the system load went up to, but it was high.  
> Maybe 6 or 7.  My computer is pretty fast.  Athlon XP 2800+, full SCSI 
> (except the Sony DVD), 512 MB RAM.  Maybe it is because the Sony is the 
> only IDE device in the system???  It seemed odd to me that merely 
> copying a DVD to a disk image on a hard drive would suck the system 
> resources almost dry.  During the actual write process I could work on 
> the computer.

Two possibilities here for what is going on here:

First, the DVD drive might not be acting as a bus-master for
the transfer, which means data is transfered through the CPU
instead of directly to RAM/Disk.  That can easily suck up
all your resources, and is why I personally use *only* SCSI
CD/DVD writers.  Most IDE CD/DVD writers have this
capability now, but not all.

The second possibility is simply poorly written software
that doesn't let bus-mastering do what it does best (reduce
the resource cost of data transfer).  Not many people (and
even fewer companies) care about writing software the
"right" way... they just want to get a finished product
regardless of the quality.  

Also note that while your DVD writing is limited to a very
slow speed, reading is not.  Again, if you're using poorly
written software/drivers, full-speed CD/DVD reads can take
up all system resources simply because of the speed at which
they occur.

--David