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I can burn my RIDATA 16X 4.7 GB DVD's fine at 8x, full speed and all, but when I go to copy them it takes 40+ minutes to copy a full disc when as of a week or so ago when it used to take less than 10 minutes. I thought perhaps some of the discs were bad but I went back and tried copying a disc that I had burned earlier that had copied in less than 10 minutes the first time and it copied really slow too. My DVD drive model is an IDE Optiarc DVD RW AD-7170A. I've had it for about a year and a half and have burned probably 100-200 DVD-r's, so I'm thinking perhaps its wearing out? Either that or there's something flaky in the firmware and updating it would help?

If it helps, I have an ancient computer(don't laugh it works for me)...Dell Optiplex Pentium 3 500 MHZ, 384 MB RAM, 8 GB ATI Rage card, 500 gig IDE HD, etc. If I need to provide more information let me know.

It may be that you have a resource hog running while you're trying to burn a disk.  Is it possible your burning software has been "upgraded" recently?  Have you recently run a big Windows "Update" (NOTRIOUS for wreaking havoc on an otherwise stable system)?  What about your antivirus?  Is that new or updated?  Antivirus can be a resource hog, too.

Outside of that, have you looked to see if others have had similar problems with that optical drive?  Perhaps there is a firmware upgrade that addresses your issue.

Optiarc isn't a bad brand name, although I think that both NEC and Sony made more stable drives seperately (especially NEC) before they got together as Optiarc.  I'm not inclined to think it's wearing out, but that is certainly always a possiblity. 

Hrm, I haven't installed anything new recently that I can remember, but I'll look anyway. Heck I don't have an anti virus and dont have the internet at my house (this is a different computer I'm using for the internet) so I dont use windows updates that can't be it. And I'm using nero 6.6 and haven't upgraded that at all so that's not it either. I have my hard drive partitioned into 3 parts with my videos and music on my 2nd and 3rd partitions, so if it comes down to reinstalling windows I could do it. But for now I've still got plenty of space on my hard drive and can copy a file here and there without it taking too much time, so I don't think I'll be reinstalling anytime soon.

 Thanks for the advice.

n00body:

I thought perhaps some of the discs were bad but I went back and tried copying a disc that I had burned earlier that had copied in less than 10 minutes the first time and it copied really slow too.

is the box to "verify" after burn checked ?

Tallon41

Check to see if there's alot of activity on your hard drive when starting the copy. I'm summing that you're copying from one drive to another. One of the ways that it might be done is that the original disk gets copied over to the computer first, and then after that starts the actual burn on the second drive. The faster option is to copy from one dvd drive to the burner directly, i think there's an option somewhere for that.