Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 19:52:17 -0400 From: Andy Stewart <andystewart@comcast.net> I asked this question at the most recent WLUG meeting. I've noticed that my CD burner (according to K3B) averages about 24X, even though it is advertised as a 48X CD burner. Is this to be expected, or do I have a cheap(er) drive that can't sustain the data rate? It is an IDE/ATAPI drive (NEC3550). It takes approx. 4 minutes for me to burn a 700MB CD (including some fiddling and diddling about calibrating power, fixating, etc). I use Memorex CD-R media (52X, 700MB, 80 min). I'm curious about your CD buring experiences, especially if they are faster than mine. I'd like to know what drive you have, the media you use, and most importantly, how did you determine your drive speed? CD's burn faster (in MB/sec) near the outside of the disc than near the inside, and they're burned from inside out. So they're always going to start slow and speed up. I have a 48x drive, and if I'm burning a full disc (where the CD is capable of that) it reaches something close to that near the end of the disc. At the beginning it's more like 16x; it averages maybe 25-30x for the whole disc, exclusive of fixating, power calibration, etc. 4 minutes net for a 700 MB CD sounds about right to me. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton