SATA Burner?

[foozy]

I saw a friend of mine backing up movies with a LiteOn SATA DVD-burner the other day, and it absolutely astounded me. He was pushing 10kkb a second transfer rate, -without- a SATA HDD.

What kind of numbers do those of you with a complete SATA setup get? I never noticed too much of a difference with SATA HDDs, but SATA burners seem crazy.

Maybe i'm imagining it, eh.

 

[Rick]

I think that was imagination...

It has MUCH more to do with the drive itself than the interface.

SATA-1 (150mb/sec) isn't really that much faster than IDE (133mb/sec) to start with and no optical drive gets anywhere close to using even half of that.... So SATA should be irrelevant.

So most likely, your friend got a new burner (maybe that new Lite-on 20X DVD-RW SATA) and because it is a newer, faster drive, it burns much faster.

He was pushing 10kkb a second transfer rate

I didn't quite understand this? 10kb/sec is pathetic. 100kb/sec is also pathetic. 10MB/sec would be good and 100MB/sec would be unrealistically fast. So I'm not sure what you meant here....

 

[foozy]

You missed a K. 10kkb, 10,000kb, 10mb/second. Shorthand isn't such a good communication tool

As far as I know it was a standard 16x drive, so the only change I attributed it to would be the SATA interface. What else would cause it? Just the fact thats it a new drive?

 

[Rick]

10kkb... it all makes sense now.

Even though optical burners claim 16x etc.. They do vary greatly. 16x is actually supposed to be about 22 MB/sec, but as you see, 10 MB/sec is about all you're going to get. There are a number of IDE drives that average slightly higher than 10MB/s while burning DVDs, so its really not all that impressive and it definitely isn't a result of having a SATA interface.

A full DVD on any modern 16x+ DVD burner should burn in about 6-8 minutes. If you find that your own drive is taking much longer, then you might want to make sure your drive is not running in PIO mode, which is a common issue that greatly slows down burn & read speeds.

 

[foozy]

Cool, thanks Rick, I never paid much attention to burn speeds - i'm a pretty patient person.