Apparently if I go over 16x in my neighborhood I get stopped by the Burn Error Police
I'm using a Sony CD-RW (CRX210E1) which is a 48x12x48 drive and a 120GB 7200 RPM Maxtor hard drive. Both are inside their own generic FireWire enclosure. These are connected to my iBook G3/800 and I'm using Toast Titanium 5.2 on Mac OS X for the CD burning software.
I regularly burn 5 or more CDs at a time. Using 40x CD-Rs (having tried all kinds of name brand discs) I can burn the first two at 40x or 32x with no problem. After that, if I continue to burn at high speeds, I either get an error within the first minute of burning or the process just stops progressing and requires a force quit of Toast and a turning off of the CD-RW. I get the same results whether I have everything connect through a FireWire hub or I have the drives chained together going to the iBook. The max speed I can burn is 16x which is what my iBook's internal Combo drive can burn at.
I'm generally burning from Toast disc images on either the iBook's hard drive or the FireWire hard drive but I have also tried direct CD to CD-R burning with the same results.
My only thoughts are that the single FireWire port on the iBook can't handle anything high speed for very long. I don't need the full 48x speed, 32x would make me very happy. If anyone has any thoughts, similar experiences, or even solutions or a work around I would be very appreciative.