Hello, I bought a Lite-on 32x/12x/40x cd rewriter (atapi). I installed it in this cofiguration: * pirmary master: my bootable harddisk (seagate barracuda ata100-7200 rpm, windows XP) * Primary slave: 50X actima cd-rom * Secondary master: Lite-on cd-rw *secondary slave: older harddisk (samsung 10GB-5400 rpm) The ide-cables I'm using: the cable on the secondary ide-port is the one that came with my computer (bought in october 2000) and the cable on the primary port is a cable that I took from an old unused pentium 75MHz. When I'm writing cd's at more that 16X, the writer pauses several times because the buffer is empty. if I write at 32x, many files aren't copied correctly (when verifieing data it gives errors that files aren't the same) I know that this last thing can be caused by low quality cd's (which they are I think), but I wonder if it's normal that the buffer empties so fast? This causes to take the writer almost 7 minutes to write a cd when I'm doing nothing else and even longer when I'm eg just browsing the internet. Could it be because I'm not using ata66/100 cables? How do I determine if I'm using such cables? I already set my bios to enable UDMA and set both ide-channels to 'udma if available in XP but that doesn't seem to help. Other system specs: amd-k6-2 500MHz, 384MB ram. If it would help, I can detach my cd-rom, as I don't use it... Any help? Johan

IMO, 2 things to change: get a new ribbon cable for the hard drives, as the old cable from the 75 Mhz machine is probably not Ultra ATA 100. The ribbon cable you want has 80 conductors instead of 40 (difference is very noticeable visually). Second, put both hard drives on primary IDE channel (boot drive as master), and both CD's on secondary, with CD-RW as secondary master. If your burning software has capability, set the buffer size to Auto. If not, increase it manually (check 'preferences'>buffer) Hope this helps. Rex

i would not put the two hard drives on the same cable. The older 10 gig hard drive is probably an ata33, which means your ata100 drive will drop down to ana ata33. Therefore i suggest not using the 10 gig drive. Leave your main hard drive on primary master, your cdrw as master on secondary, and cdrom as slave on secondary.

Is there a way to determin if a cable is ata100 or not? Both cables look exactly the same, except that the old cable is made with blue plastic arround the wires and the new one has grey plastic. Also, is there a way to find out if the old drive is ata33 or not? I noticed in the nero history file that both cd-drives are using dma-mode buth my harddisks don't. Could this be causing the buffer to run empty? 1 thing I already solved, the errors: I had autodetected all my ide-devices in the bios and then saved them like that, but that only seems to work wel for the harddisks. I've set the sec. master to auto and now it detects the writer correctly during startup. I'm using Nero; in the preferences, under 'ultrabuffer', it is set to 'automatic configuration'. Should I leave it that way or increase it manually? I would like to keep the old harddisk, as I'm running linux on it, but I could try and see what happens if I unplug it... Thanks already Johan

Well if it happens to mention it on the cable that would be the only way to tell. The old cable yor talking about if it came with the system there is no way that it could be ata100. The blue plastic is just a way of telling u its the primary cable. Did u switch your drive cables around so both your hard disk are on your primary cable and your cdroms are on the secondary. U said u check in your BIOS to auto detect some stuff. Is your hard drive mode or dma enabled in the BIOS? Having the cd drive running off the primary channel will slow your hard drive down a huge amount. U will notice some performance if u just kept the master hard drive on the primary cable by itself and just gotten rid of the 10GB. I heard that when u have a faster and slower hard drive on the same cable it will only max out the speed for the slower hard drive. If u havent switched the drives around like mentioned above then do so and get back to us. good luck

High speed burners require high speed processors to deliver the data as fast as the burner can record it. 500MHz just isn't enough to keep the buffer from emptying. Set the buffer to its maximum size, defrag the hard drive often, and make sure your cds are rated for that high a speed. You should also run the Nero speed test to find the optimal speed for your system. You sometimes find that the burn actually goes quicker using a slightly slower speed as the pauses during the burnproof can add quite a bit of time. The fact that it takes more time to burn when you are browsing is a pretty good hint that your processor speed is what's holding things back.

could be the processor indeed... I disconnected the old harddrive, -> still the same. I found a utility on the seagate website to enable udma for my harddisk, so I'm going to try that right now. If that doesn't help, I think I will try the last option (besides a ne processor...), buying a ata 66/100 cable... Johan