[NBLUG/talk] Speeding up CDR burns

Eric Eisenhart eric at nblug.org
Tue Feb 1 13:13:23 PST 2005


On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 11:57:47AM -0800, Robert Hayes wrote:
> The drive is a Plextor rated to burn CDRs at 24X. 
> The best reliable burn speed I've gotten is 10X. 
> At 12X the buffer is prone to underrun if anything else is happening on the 
> box.
> 
> The box is a 2.2GHz with 512MB ram. I'm running Debian 3.0. The drive is a 
> 30GB 7200 rpm and I've optimized the throughput with hdparm.
> 
> My cdrecord is Cdrecord-Clone 2.01.01a01
> The cdrdao is Cdrdao version 1.1.9
> 
> Usually I just run K3B to burn files. 
> The cdrecord buffer size is set to 128MB.
> The cdrdao block size is set to 128 blocks.

Well, let's see...

First thing, run "cdrecord -prcap" and look for something like
"Buffer-Underrun-Free".  If your drive does support that, you'll want to
turn support in cdrecord for it on.  Sanyo, Ricoh and Yamaha were the first
to support it, but many other drives support that in some way or another.

Second, what IDE bus is the CD drive hooked up to?  In particular, is the
CD-drive hdb?  hdc?  hdd?  If you're using a 2.4 (or earlier) kernel,
"cat /proc/cmdline" or look in /var/log/dmesg to figure out which underlying
device the IDE drive is hooked up to.  (or just open up the case.  What you
want is for the CD drive and the hard drive to be on separate cables, not a
single cable that daisy chains one to the other).

Third, are you running cdrecord as a "regular user" or as root?  If you run
it as root, it should be able to request a "real time" (or close to it)
priority.  That will make the rest of your system slower (as in, it could
appear to lock up, even).
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder, Scribe and InstallFest Coordinator
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit




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