The Firmware Page

Are your systems & drives fast enough for the latest high speed DVD burners?
Check them out with THIS TOOL I found from Roxio

Checking the drives transfer rate the speed is shown up to16x CD speed maximum, and as DVD speed is 4x the CD speed it needs a little recalculation and here are my figures based on the DVD drives published burning speeds
1x = 1,385 K/s 1.385 M/s
2x = 2,770 K/s 2.77 M/s
4x = 5,540 K/s 5.54 M/s
6x = 8,310 K/s 8.31 M/s
8x = 11,080 K/s 11.08 M/s
12x = 16,620 K/s 16.62 M/s
16x = 22,160 K/s 22.16 M/s
So if your Hard Drive or DVD-ROM can sustain 23,000K/s (23 M/s) transfer rate it should be OK at burning a 16x speed DVD

Useful tool

I get 1311 K/sec minimal, 13.2M/s, 6x OTF and 16x image for a laptop 2.5"HD 4200RPM
and
3415 K/sec minimal, 25.3M/s, 16x OTF, 16x image for a 80GB Western Digital 7200rpm drive in a firewire enclosure.

HD Tach is another great way to measure you're hard drive's transfer rate. It's free for non-commercial use. Too bad Roxio hasn't updated this software for DVD speeds themselves, it has crashed on me a few times too

nice 1 flash

if u use nero , u can also check the tranfer speeds with that

Agreed! I installed and updated my software to the latest Win on CD 6.02 in hope that it had been updated but found it to be the same antiquated version but it has a nice easy to use interface so I decided to post it anyway

http://www.shonk.org/Pictures/file/Hd.jpg

am i good for 16x

I have put my Pioneer 108 drive in an external dual link ADS drive and have noticed that my speed with my Pentium M 1.5 processor, my max speed of burning with USB 2.0 is 4x and when connecting through Firewire, i can get 8x and 12x speeds.....Obviously with the faster speed of USB 2.0 at 480 compared to Firewire at 400, the downfall of USB is the added processor usage.....

Its not your system its your case, check out this link:

http://forum.rpc1.com/viewtopic.php?t=30078

I took mine back and am glad I had only had i for a week.

Good to know its my case....sad part is that at least with firewire i got 8x burns, but my firewire stopped working after the first day of using it with the case (dont know if its the firewire on the case as a friend had that problem with ADS or my port on my laptop - will have extra hardware this weekend to test both). So as of now im stuck with the 4x USB.

Anyone know of a case that will handle the 16x optical drives correctly?

Much appricated.

As the makers of those cases tend to use different bridge chipsets over time, there isn't an easy answer to your question.
Best is to get the information which bridge chip is used in a case. For FireWire, currently the best ones are from Oxford or Prolific. I prefer Oxford, because imo they give you unmatched support for firmware updating and configuration and they are widely used.

Well, in real world usage even the best USB2 bridges give you about 10Mbytes/s LESS data rate than current good quality FireWire chips, even on fastest PCs. They all (and their drivers) got better over the years but the difference remained in favour of FW. (If you want to look into this youself, search for test of external hard drives.)

I'd look for a case with Oxford FW bridge (perhaps FW+USB2 for flexibility), it will give you a real world rate of around 40MB/s - enough for your writers for some time...

Mike

raid?