[tobster]

Hi all.

I recently upgraded the combo drive in my PowerBook 667 DVI from the standard 8x burning to a 24x burning (same as in today's powerbooks and ibooks I believe). Great drive it seems and burning disks finishes fine and all disks are ok so far.

Problem is though, that if I pass the 12x burning offered by toast 6 (using 16x and 24x for example) the seconds just take twice as long to pass. It always seems to end up on the 12x stage. This happens in all modes of burning (image, data, mp3, and so on). Same thing happens in iTunes as far as I can see.

I'm using Mac OS X 10.3.2 (happened in earlier versions too though), and Toast 6.

Any suggestions are welcome.

- Tobbi

[bmhome1]

Its common for laptop burners to not achieve actual burn speeds for the highest settings according to xlr8youmac.com's drive data bases.

One reason being that, like laptop battery times, those speeds are more theoretic than real-life, the speeds being based on only the outer CD disk tracks reaching that speed.

Also, buffer under run protection will slow the burning to the safest speed, influenced by processor speed and availability (other processes running) and RAM buffer. Try quitting other apps and increasing the RAM buffer allocation in Toast. Also, a contiguous large file will burn faster than fragmented disk segment files needing to be read.