I've had my Sony DRU-710A drive for about 6 months now. At first it use to take me around 40 minutes to complete a DVD using shrink. After downloading the firmware for it, it only took 4-20 minutes. However, since then I've reformatted my computer and had everything reinstalled. Everything was going fine for a while and then it all slowed down. It started taking 60 minutes to complete a DVD. So I got on firmware and downloaded the newest firmware again:
Now it takes 90+ minutes to do one DVD and is running at about 53 frames/sec. Why is it going so slow? Is there something I can do to fix this problem? I know that some DVD burners slow down and stop working with lots of use, but mine is fairly new and I hardly ever use it. Thanx.
Mos likely your transfer mode got switched to Pio mode instead of DMA or UDMA mode. This will definetely slow you down.
Go into device manager
Open up the tree for IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Double Click the primary/advanced setting and make sure current transfer mode is DMA/UDMA- or if available. Make sure they do not say PIO mode.
Do the same to the secondary controller/s.
For example,my Primary is UDMA 5 while my secondary is UDMA 2.
If one or more of those channels are in pio mode,then uninstall the driver and reboot-one channel at a time. Windows xp,if that is your OS,should hook it back up to DMA or UDMA mode.Do the same to the other channels if they are in pio mode.If you don't have XP,then I'm not sure how you go about that.
When you get about 5 or 6 burn errors in a row,windows will revert the transfer mode to pio mode for safety reasons.It happens quite often with low quality media/burning too fast/or a combination of both.
Some other things that can slow you down: Virus's/spyware/heavily fragmented hard drive.Also double check those backup settings in DVD Shrink.
Maybe you are using the slow adaptive error compensation and perform deep analysis in the quality settings options and before this you weren't? That'll definitely slow you down.That'll give you a slow analyzing and then an even slower encoding.Lots of people get confused on those quality settings and don't realize how much slower they can make the backup process.
Also close out all background programs. This will free up some memory and help speed you up.No need to be multi-tasking while you are backing up dvds.The more programs you shut down,the better.
If you burn with Nero,post a burn log from it.It'll help tell us the problem/s,but remember to edit out the serial number that starts with 1A23-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx
