This question involves a comparison between two machines I have.

One has dvd burning issues the other doesn't.

Issue one is Intel board, PIII 1Ghz with 512mb pc133 and 2k pro SP4 using a older NEC ND-1100A burner. If I burn anything over 2.4x I get burning errors. Even during 2.4x burn the buffer is all over the place.

I have another computer of almost equal era,
Soyo board, running a PIII 866, 512mb pc133, Except for running XP SP2 but it has the same DVD burner. This one burns flawlessly at it's top speed even under heavy loads of other programs running.

1Ghz has 20 gig with os, 2 80gigs and 2 200 gigs and dvd burner. 20 gig on it's own channel, dvd burner on it's own channel, 2 200's on controller card IDE1 and 2 80's on controller card IDE2. All hard drives tested with HD tach get at least 91mb/s transfer or faster including the 20 gig.

The 866 has a single 80 gig drive, and dvd burner both on seperate channels and the 80 gig drive has about a 90's mb/s transfer speed.

Both have same dvd burning program.

I swap burners and still receive same problems.
Is there that much of a difference between 2k sp4 and XP sp2 that would cause such an error?

Could it be too many hard drives causing an error?

When you have 560 gigs of drives loaded it's nice to back them up to dvd. I don't have a good enough network speed to do it over the LAN.

ASUS A7V8X
Athlon XP 2700+ @ 2.17ghz
1GB DDR 2700
nVidia 128mb FX 5200
WD 80gb SE
NEC ND-3500AG DVD R/RW

If anything, I would expect a 2K system would be faster than XP. But don't take that as Gospel.

The number of drives on the system should have no effect.

I assume that it acts the same burning from different hard drives. Have you done a thorough check for malware on the 1ghz system?

MBoard chipset drivers, DMA not enabled, if writing to the HD and then to the burner a fragmented drive. The above may be causes.

If you are getting buffer underrun errors the burner must be pretty old. Burnproof technology has been standard on burners for some time.

You might thing about replacing the burners. The burning speed of new units is much faster than what you currently have.

Only the burners do it in the 1ghz machine not the 866. I have a new dvd burner in my newest machine the others are downgrades from the newest machine and cheap ebay purchases.

I don't remember how to check DMA on 2k, All drives are defragmented, I always right straight to disc from a hard drive. Never made or make any copies like disc to disc, though I probably should for duplicate backups.

After I check DMA I think i'll look at the chipset drivers "never thought about that"

Shouldn't have any malware as I don't surf internet on 1ghz just use it as a storage pc though i'll run spybot on it and see.

ASUS A7V8X
Athlon XP 2700+ @ 2.17ghz
1GB DDR 2700
nVidia 128mb FX 5200
WD 80gb SE
NEC ND-3500AG DVD R/RW

One other thing to note. If transfering files from harddrive to optical drive the transfer will be extremely slow if both drives are on the SAME IDE channel (cable).