DVD Burner Bottleneck?

[Karesh]

My desktop is about 6 years old now but still does fine for general applications and web browsing.
Current specifications:

• Windows XP SP3 32-Bit
• Socket 754 ECS Goal3+(1.1C) Motherboard
• AMD Sempron 3000+
• 512MB DDR Memory
• Integrated Audio/Video
• WD WD400JB 40GB IDE Hard Drive
• HP 300i IDE DVD Burner

My relatives want to buy me something for Christmas and I thought maybe upgrading my burner would be a good idea. I'm thinking of getting the Sony Optiarc AD-7260S-0B for 18$ shipped. My motherboard does have 2 unused SATA ports.

My current drive will only write DVD+R/RW and only write at 2X-4X, meaning a full disc burn takes about 30 minutes to an hour to complete. I recently purchases a 100-disc cake of Taiyo Yuden 16X DVD+Rs and would like to burn them at their rated speed (or better to 24X!).

My question is when burning my CPU usage will peg itself to 100% and stay there for the entire burn process and I can hear my HD thrash too. When copying files from the disc audio and video becomes choppy as if there is a DPC latency problem which I assume is the HD being hammered with I/Os or writes that make it show its age. Given these observations and the age of my computer, will a new DVD drive be bottlenecked in some way (say by my old HD?) to keep it from buring at its rated speed? Or is performance mostly just determined by the burner's laser ability?

 

[defaultluser]

Your problem is VERY characteristic of your motherboard running the IDE controller in PIO mode instead of DMA. In PIO mode, the CPU is maxed and transfers are slow because this mode takes many times more processing power.

For the IDE devices, there is an easy fix:

Go to Device Manager
IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Find the primary IDE channel, Properties, Advanced Settings tab. Make sure both channels are DMA.
Find the secondaryIDE channel, Properties, Advanced Settings tab. Make sure both channels are DMA.

If you get this same problem with your new SATA burner, then there's only one way to fix it. You have to uninstall the SATA driver (in device manager) and let Windows reinstall it. Windows assumes that SATA devices can never drop from DMA to PIO mode, and that's just not true - it's not common, but it can happen.

ALSO, A WORD OF WARNING: some of the older transitional SATA boards share the SATA slots with one of the IDE controllers. You might want to check your motherboard documentation.

 

[E4g1e]

Your problem is VERY characteristic of your motherboard running the IDE controller in PIO mode instead of DMA. In PIO mode, the CPU is maxed and transfers are slow because this mode takes many times more processing power.

For the IDE devices, there is an easy fix:

Go to Device Manager
IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Find the primary IDE channel, Properties, Advanced Settings tab. Make sure both channels are DMA.
Find the secondaryIDE channel, Properties, Advanced Settings tab. Make sure both channels are DMA.

If you get this same problem with your new SATA burner, then there's only one way to fix it. You have to uninstall the SATA driver (in device manager) and let Windows reinstall it. Windows assumes that SATA devices can never drop from DMA to PIO mode, and that's just not true - it's not common, but it can happen.

ALSO, A WORD OF WARNING: some of the older transitional SATA boards share the SATA slots with IDE slots. You might want to check your motherboard documentation.

Actually, only part of the problem is caused by the PIO issue. Much of the slow burn performance is due to the burner itself. I checked the specs of that particular HP burner, and it cannot write any faster than 4x no matter what. However, I agree that the near-100% CPU utilization is characteristic of a controller dropping from DMA to PIO transfers.

Also, some SATA controllers do not properly support optical drives, if at all. If the SiS 761 chipset is one of those, the OP would have to settle for another IDE (PATA) optical drive.

 

[defaultluser]

Actually, it's not DMA versus PIO. It's the burner itself. I checked the specs of that particular HP burner, and it cannot write any faster than 4x no matter what. However, I agree that the near-100% CPU utilization is characteristic of a controller dropping from DMA to PIO transfers.

Right, he can power his 4x burn, but just barely. He should not upgrade the burner until he resolves the DMA issue, because it's likely affecting both the hard disk and the burner.

 

[Karesh]

Actually, only part of the problem is caused by the PIO issue. Much of the slow burn performance is due to the burner itself. I checked the specs of that particular HP burner, and it cannot write any faster than 4x no matter what. However, I agree that the near-100% CPU utilization is characteristic of a controller dropping from DMA to PIO transfers.

Also, some SATA controllers do not properly support optical drives, if at all. If the SiS 761 chipset is one of those, the OP would have to settle for another IDE (PATA) optical drive.

Really? I always thought that the 100% CPU usage was just the price of using such an old CPU. I mean it is a socket 754 single-core sempron. I'd imagine that even an Atom processor could beat it fairly easily now..

Right, he can power his 4x burn, but just barely. He should not upgrade the burner until he resolves the DMA issue, because it's likely affecting both the hard disk and the burner.

So even if I did upgrade my drive (assuming my chipset's SATA connectors were compatible or using a faster IDE drive if not) I wouldn't be able to burn at 16X?
Honestly the 100% processor usage doesn't bother me as much as the length of time it takes to back up files to disc.

Here's how my device manager is setup with only 2 IDE devices (the HD and optical drive):

As you can see there are 4 IDE channels, 2 of which (the "top" primary & secondary) are empty.
They look like this:

The "bottom" primary channel is already in DMA mode which I assume is the HD:

The "bottom" secondary channel is in PIO mode which I assume is the DVD burner:

I had noticed this a long time ago but couldn't figure out what to do about it so I just left it alone.

 

[defaultluser]

Really? I always thought that the 100% CPU usage was just the price of using such an old CPU. I mean it is a socket 754 single-core sempron. I'd imagine that even an Atom processor could beat it fairly easily now..

When you have DMA enabled, you don't need that much processing power. Don't sell yourself short - your 1.8 GHz Sempron is probably about twice as powerful as an Intel Atom, and perfectly capable of burning at 16x speed with DMA enabled on both the hard drive and the burner.

So even if I did upgrade my drive (assuming my chipset's SATA connectors were compatible or using a faster IDE drive if not) I wouldn't be able to burn at 16X?
Honestly the 100% processor usage doesn't bother me as much as the length of time it takes to back up files to disc.

Here's how my device manager is setup with only 2 IDE devices (the HD and optical drive):

As you can see there are 4 IDE channels, 2 of which (the "top" primary & secondary) are empty.
They look like this:

The "bottom" primary channel is already in DMA mode which I assume is the HD:

The "bottom" secondary channel is in PIO mode which I assume is the DVD burner:

I had noticed this a long time ago but couldn't figure out what to do about it so I just left it alone.

Well, did you fix it? You can change the mode back to DMA.

The switch to PIO happens when Windows encounters errors when using DMA mode. This could indicate issues with drivers or hardware, but usually they are just isolated errors that don't recur. Windows is just too lazy to try DMA again, so you have to force it back.

Try changing your secondary channel back to DMA, and perform a burn and see what happens to your CPU usage.

 

[Karesh]

Well, did you fix it? You can change the mode back to DMA.

The switch to PIO happens when Windows encounters errors when using DMA mode. This could indicate issues with drivers or hardware, but usually they are just isolated errors that don't recur. Windows is just too lazy to try DMA again, so you have to force it back.

Try changing your secondary channel back to DMA, and perform a burn and see what happens to your CPU usage.

Maybe . Since it was already set to use DMA if available and was currently using PIO I thought that was how it should have been (for a long time), but someone earlier in the thread mentioned uninstalling the device drivers so I did this:

1. Selected "uninstall" on the secondary IDE channel from the device manager
2. Right-clicked and selected "Scan for Hardware Changes" in the device manager CP

Windows then rediscovered the IDE channel and my DVD burner with it and reinstalled the device driver. Now the device manger advanced settings tab looks like this:

I've rebooted the computer and the setting holds, so I'm now going to run a test burn with Process Explorer open and I'll report back the results.

 

[Karesh]

Well it did help. Monitoring CPU usage while burning a full disc now shows 90-95% CPU usage only about two-thirds of the time with the other third spent around 25-33% usage.
I'm really not sure, given the speed of my system, what constitutes "acceptable" CPU usage.
Also while copying from the disc back to the desktop no longer makes audio/video playback grind to a crawl.

If this is where I should be, would getting an upgraded DVD burner reduce my burn times?
Or is there still some bottlenecks/incompatibilites that would hinder the burn speeds of a new optical drive from what they 'ought be?

 

[defaultluser]

Well it did help. Monitoring CPU usage while burning a full disc show 90-95% CPU usage only about two-thirds of the time with the other third spend around 25-33% usage.
I'm really not sure, given the speed of my system, what constitutes "acceptable" CPU usage.
Also while copying from the disc back to the desktop no longer makes audio/video playback grind to a crawl.

If this is where I should be, would getting an upgraded DVD burner reduce my burn times?
Or is there still some bottlenecks/incompatibilites that would hinder the burn speeds of a new optical drive from what they 'ought be?

It sounds like you have enough processing power to push up to 16x. You might also want to consider a faster SATA hard drive, since the minimum transfer rate for your drive is under 30MB/s, and DVD writing at 16x will require 20MB/s sustained.

A faster hard drive would also do a lot for improving system performance, and you can get one for under $50 if you shop around. You'll have to check compatibility with SATA II and your SiS chipset (I recall some VIA chipsets not liking SATA II drives at all), but if you can resolve that, a hard disk upgrade would make your whole user experience better.