I finally broke down and purchased a CD burner for my home PC. Sorry, I’m at work so I don’t have the model number and such, but it’s a pretty standard 8x IDE kind of thing.
The problem is I’m getting lots of buffer underflow errors. So far the only way I’ve been able to overcome these is restrict the recording speed to its lowest setting. This works, but makes the burner much less fun to use.
What’s the root problem that causes a buffer underflow in this situation? This is an older (about 4-5 years) PC with a PII-350 processor, average hard drive from the same era, and 320 MByte of RAM.
It’s a SE440BX-2 motherboard, so I could upgrade the processor to a max of either a PIII-650 or PIII-850 (depending on the rev number, I have to pull the case to check). The current hard drive is not full but I wouldn’t be adverse to buying a new (presumably faster) drive. Memory is cheap and I’ve got a free slot for another 256 MByte SIMM, so I could do that. Where am I going to get the most bang for my buck when it comes to burning CD’s?
Or is it something else entirely, like the software I’m using or the controller I’m using to run the CD and hard drives? Any ideas?
You didn’t say whether you are trying to make a data CD or music CD.
If you’re trying to make a data CD you should first create a CD image and then create the CD from this CD image instead of directly making the CD from files on your hard drive. When you make a data CD directly from files on your hard drive (even if you’ve defraged your disk) the head must race back and forth between the directory tracks and the actual file and thus cannot feed data to the CD drive fast enough.
If you’re trying to make a music CD it will be helpful to free up more space on your hard drive and defrag it. It would be even more helpful to dedicate an entire volume with no other files on it for temporary storage of music files.
In either case, you should not attempt to run any other program that would use significant amount of CPU time or disk accesses while you are burning the CD.
At this point it’s mostly been music CD’s, but it will be data CD’s as well in the future. Defragging makes sense and is something I haven’t done in a while, so I can certainly give that a shot.
Handy, per the specs for the burner my system does meet the minimum requirements (although I’m certainly not exceeding the minimums by any great amount). Is there any single upgrade that’s most likely to help?
2: Buy one with “burn proof” technology. It will come with burn proof compatible writing software. I reccomend Plextor drives. see http://www.newegg.com
3: Problem solved
If you have to keep the current unit you will need to make sure the DMA option is activated for the drive. De-frag your drive. If worse comes to worst write the CD you wish to copy out as an iso or cif image file then burn it directly from the hard disk.
I have an AMD K6 (Pentium II clone), 128M RAM and just bought a TDK CR-RW. The software that ships with it touts buffer underflow protection, and it has worked fine without a hitch. I don’t know if upgrading your computer is necessarily the key–I think the other two contributors have the right idea.
A burn proof CD-R drive is worth every penny. I had one of the early generation HP 7200 2x drives which was junk. A $100 paperweight. I recently replaced it with a TDK 12x/40x/10x drive and never looked back. I can continue to multitask while burning a CD and have never had a problem. It will copy an original to hard disk and burn the duplicate in about 8 minutes.
i have a plextor plexwriter 10/12/32A. a friend needed 100 cd’s copied for a class he is teaching. i burned them in about 5-6 minutes each, while surfing the net and composing email.
my daughter is fond of compiling her own music mixes. we have gone through a few hundred blank discs with just 3 or 4 failed discs list to buffer underrun.
Defragging is a good practice if you plan on doing this often. But one of the biggest culprits I’ve seen are those little programs that like to load up at startup, like your messenger services, network browsing, your harddisk checking utilities, your system checking utilities, etc.
Having been doing stuff like this since the time the first HP’s hit the market I’ve made hundreds of coasters. The best way to prevent this is to make sure that the only thing your computer is doing at burn time is burning. Exit all the programs in the system tray, shut down all applications except the burner program. And burn-proof units do perform better.
Also, did you run the system tests prior to burning? That will tell you some stuff about the speed your system can handle.