I was kindly given a Pioneer DVD A-04 today. Getting a bit old now, but it does (or should do) the job.
I have two slight problems though. The drive is up and burning, but k3b on SuSE 9.0 moans that if I want to use Disk at Once mode I need to either find a copy of cdrdao that supports ATAPI writers or start using ide-scsi.
I have never had to use ide-scsi before as I have always had SCSI writers, I tried the obvious adding hdc=ide-scsi bit to Lilo (as a guess) but it just resulted in the kernel complaining that it couldn't enable DMA for HDC. After a boot cdrecord --scanbus couldn't see it so I guess that didn't work out so well.
How do I enable ide-scsi for this drive.
Also, This drive has had a firmware update to enable it to write at 2x to the new style media , but k3b (or whatever tools it uses under the GUI) has firmly decided that this drive is a 1x drive. Any ideas how I change this or force the issue. Funilly enough it also missreports the maximum speed of my Yamaha SCSI drive as 6x when cdrecord is quite happy running it at it's full speed of 8x
Side note, Anybody can make me a silly offer for my ageing (but still pretty good) external SCSI writer (complete with Ultra2 lead) even if the drive is a bit slow, the external case may be handy for a faster drive.
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I was kindly given a Pioneer DVD A-04 today. Getting a bit old now, but it does (or should do) the job.
I have two slight problems though. The drive is up and burning, but k3b on SuSE 9.0 moans that if I want to use Disk at Once mode I need to either find a copy of cdrdao that supports ATAPI writers or start using ide-scsi.
I have never had to use ide-scsi before as I have always had SCSI writers, I tried the obvious adding hdc=ide-scsi bit to Lilo (as a guess) but it just resulted in the kernel complaining that it couldn't enable DMA for HDC.
What exactly did you put in lilo? 'append = " hdd=ide-scsi"' has always worked for me with no need to do anything else (albeit for CDR rather than DVD, natch). Perhaps you need to play with hdparm a bit? I *think* the exact command you might want is hdparm /dev/hdc dma=1. But that is dredged from the depths of my memory as I haven't used it in ages and haven't got it installed on my current box.
Maybe the cd recording how-to will help (from tldp.org obviously <G>)
BenE
On Thursday 01 April 2004 20:42, beneboy wrote:
What exactly did you put in lilo? 'append = " hdd=ide-scsi"' has always worked for me with no need to do anything else (albeit for CDR rather than DVD, natch). Perhaps you need to play with hdparm a bit? I *think* the exact command you might want is hdparm /dev/hdc dma=1. But that is dredged from the depths of my memory as I haven't used it in ages and haven't got it installed on my current box.
append = "hdc=ide-scsi enableapic vga=0x0317 splash=silent desktop"
hdc is my A-04 so I assume that's right.
It does do something as without it DMA mode works fine, with it the kernel reports no device found when setting DMA for hdc
Does it matter that I have a real SCSI adapter installed on this machine too, how for example does ide-scsi check that it's not interfering with my existing SCSI devices ? What controls the virtual scsi id of each device you emulate with ide-scsi or do they just appear starting at 1 in the order they are expressed.
Maybe the cd recording how-to will help (from tldp.org obviously <G>)
Yes I should have read that first, but I figured this is something everybody except me has had to deal with, good point though, going to read it now.
On Thursday 01 Apr 2004 10:11 pm, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I was kindly given a Pioneer DVD A-04 today. Getting a bit old now, but it does (or should do) the job.
I have two slight problems though. The drive is up and burning, but k3b on SuSE 9.0 moans that if I want to use Disk at Once mode I need to either find a copy of cdrdao that supports ATAPI writers or start using ide-scsi.
Strongly advise that you update your copy of K3b from the K3b website as many of these issues have been sorted out from version 0.10.x onward. . I am now using K3b 0.11.4 and Suse rpms are available AFAIR. Many improvements - for example you should find that the ide-scsi boot option is no longer needed and there is better writer speed detection. A few minor bugs but nothing that I have found to be a problem
I also installed dvd+rw-tools which, despite the name, is useful for dvd-r burning as well. Presumably suse rpms are available (I used urpmi with mandrake 9.2 so there were no dependancy issues and it all installed and worked very easily).
Also, after upgrading the version, try running k3bsetup as root from in an x-terminal. May or may not be useful but worth trying :-)
HTH Syd
On Friday 02 April 2004 06:28, Syd Hancock wrote:
Strongly advise that you update your copy of K3b from the K3b website as many of these issues have been sorted out from version 0.10.x onward.
I tried some SuSE 9.0 rpm's linked from the k3b site, but they were built against KDE 3.2 when 9.0 ships with 3.1x, after forcing the issue I found that k3b didn't want to start (or at least get further than the splash screen)
After a lot of hair pulling I managed to upgrade to the latest version of k3b from source. Still have a few issues (mainly that my pioneer drive barfs if it is asked to burn a CD any faster than 4x, despite the fact that it should be capable of 8x) k3b still moans about the cdrdao thing and ide-scsi, but it seems to work regardless (the 4x-8x thing is not limited to just DAO mode)
Must say though that getting k3b to compile properly on my system turned into a 2 hour headache (litterally)
FIrst of I had complaints that libGL.la was not a valid archive during the build, eventually I found a post by an Nvidia maintainer to say that the comment at the top of libGL.la needed adjusting to include the word libtool !! Fancy that a comment causing a problem (apparently libtool greps the file for the words "generated" and "libtool"), before I resorted to google however I wasted some time actually believing that there was something fundamentally wrong with my GL libs.
Then I had a working k3b with no mp3 support, this turned out to be due to a missing MAD lib which was eventually installed using YaST (the funny thing here is that the prebuilt k3b on SuSE worked fine on mp3's without it)
I really like k3b, it has a nice polished feel, but the scant documentation lets it down quite a bit.
Anyway thanks Syd (and others) I now have DVD burning etc all working (apart from that speed issue)
Wayne
On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 10:41:17PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
it is asked to burn a CD any faster than 4x, despite the fact that it should be capable of 8x) k3b still moans about the cdrdao thing and ide-scsi, but it
Anyway thanks Syd (and others) I now have DVD burning etc all working (apart from that speed issue)
Quick question :) do you mean CD burning or DVD burning at 8x? If you mean DVD burning then the reason it won't burn at 8x is because the drive doesn't support it :) If you meant CD burning or something else then I got a bit confused by this and your earlier comments :)
Adam
On Friday 02 April 2004 22:21, adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
Quick question :) do you mean CD burning or DVD burning at 8x? If you mean DVD burning then the reason it won't burn at 8x is because the drive doesn't support it :) If you meant CD burning or something else then I got a bit confused by this and your earlier comments :)
Adam
Erm yes sorry about that, reading the message I can see how that isn't clear....it's been a long night.
Anyway I meant CD Burning. The drive should do 8x CD-R, 4X CD-RW, 2X DVD-R and 1X DVD-RW
I now have DVD burning etc all working (apart from that speed issue)
Do you have good 8x media?
My 4x drive frequently burns at just over 2x - at first I suspected the media, although they are rated 4x on the box and use what is supposed to be a good dye (Ritek G40 I think). But... they always seem to burn at 4x in Nero on W98 so maybe there is some little bug lurking in K3b.
It does tend to autodetect the burner as 2x not 4x so something is not yet quite right (may be fixed in later versions - I am still stuck with k3b 0.11.4 / kde3.1 until I install mandrake 10).
I have also read somewhere that for fast burning speeds the DVD should be the only drive on the ide channel which should be >= 100 speed and it should be connected with an 80-pin cable - which sounds like the belt-and-braces-and-kitchen-sink approach to me :-) But if it works...
I don't know enough about 4x/8x dvd data burning speeds to know if the ide bus speed can really be a bottleneck - can anyone give some info here please?
Syd
On Saturday 03 April 2004 06:16, Syd Hancock wrote:
Do you have good 8x media?
I think I lost you there, I was referring to CD burning speeds, my poor ole drive can only handle 2x on DVD-R
I have also read somewhere that for fast burning speeds the DVD should be the only drive on the ide channel which should be >= 100 speed and it should be connected with an 80-pin cable - which sounds like the belt-and-braces-and-kitchen-sink approach to me :-) But if it works...
Hmmm a valid point about the 80 conductor cable, Maybe that's why DMA mode keeps dropping out on me, so used to my old optical drives that only need a 40 conductor that I may have overlooked that.
I don't know enough about 4x/8x dvd data burning speeds to know if the ide bus speed can really be a bottleneck - can anyone give some info here please?
1X-CLV (1.385 MB/s) so 8X would be 11.08MB/s
ATA-1 4.16 MB/s ATA-2 16.67 MB/s ATA-3 (same as above but with SMART) ATA-4, ATA/33 UDMA 33.33 MB/s ATA-5, ATA/66 66.67 MB/s ATA-6 ATA/100 100MB/s and so on.
You are unlikely to encounter the first 3 in any machine running Linux today, so if the ATA interface is performing to spec (unlikely) and there is only one drive being accessed on each channel then No the bus shouldn't be a bottleneck.
On Saturday 03 Apr 2004 12:12 pm, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Do you have good 8x media?
I think I lost you there, I was referring to CD burning speeds, my poor ole drive can only handle 2x on DVD-R
Sorry, yes, got a bit muddled :-)
Hmmm a valid point about the 80 conductor cable, Maybe that's why DMA mode keeps dropping out on me, so used to my old optical drives that only need a 40 conductor that I may have overlooked that.
Will DMA still be an issue if the drive is seen as a scsi drive via ide-scsi (sorry, now gone past the limits of my knowledge here)? Does scsi use DMA?
I don't know enough about 4x/8x dvd data burning speeds to know if the ide bus speed can really be a bottleneck - can anyone give some info here please?
1X-CLV (1.385 MB/s) so 8X would be 11.08MB/s
ATA-1 4.16 MB/s ATA-2 16.67 MB/s ATA-3 (same as above but with SMART) ATA-4, ATA/33 UDMA 33.33 MB/s ATA-5, ATA/66 66.67 MB/s ATA-6 ATA/100 100MB/s and so on.
You are unlikely to encounter the first 3 in any machine running Linux today, so if the ATA interface is performing to spec (unlikely) and there is only one drive being accessed on each channel then No the bus shouldn't be a bottleneck.
Great, thanks for the info.
BTW, while we're on the topic, do you know what the data transfer speed for CD reading is? I've read that 1x DVD reading/writing is several times that of 1x CD data transfer but never seen the figures.
I just got 40 CDs of MP3s at very-acceptable 256k onto one DVD - and very pleased to find that my cheapo DVD player from Richer Sounds can handle MP3-DVD playback! Yes, it's fun when things *do work* sometimes :-)
Syd
Will DMA still be an issue if the drive is seen as a scsi drive via ide-scsi (sorry, now gone past the limits of my knowledge here)? Does scsi use DMA?
SCSI doesn't use DMA, but the IDE interface bit of ide-scsi should. I'm not quite sure how this works in the real world, because how do you enable DMA on an IDE drive that doesn't exist.
BTW, while we're on the topic, do you know what the data transfer speed for CD reading is? I've read that 1x DVD reading/writing is several times that of 1x CD data transfer but never seen the figures.
CD 1x is 0.15 MB/s
However the maximum rated speed of a drive is just that, you would be unlikely to obtain a sustained transfer rate of 7.8 MB/s from a 52x drive.
also
Most drives have adaptive speed controls, if the error rate is too high because of an imperfect disk then they slow down, even if the drive doesn't actually slow down then I think the error checking has the ability to request a re-read of a track, thus slowing down the output.
On Sat, Apr 03, 2004 at 06:51:32PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Will DMA still be an issue if the drive is seen as a scsi drive via ide-scsi (sorry, now gone past the limits of my knowledge here)? Does scsi use DMA?
SCSI doesn't use DMA, but the IDE interface bit of ide-scsi should. I'm not quite sure how this works in the real world, because how do you enable DMA on an IDE drive that doesn't exist.
The ide device still exists so you can enable and disable DMA etc. etc. the drive itself isn't now talking SCSI just programs will talk to the devices as if they are SCSI and the kernel will translate it to IDE.
I have just done a quick test with a cat /dev/scd0 > /tmp/tmp.iso (scd0 is my IDE Pioneer 106 dvdburner using the ide-scsi interface) to copy the contents of a 455 MegaByte CD to an iso image the first time without dma and the second with dma (set using hdparm /dev/hdd in the normal manner).
The (very) unscientific results of this showed that whichever way I tried this the job took the same amount of real time in seconds to complete (around 2m19s) (this I presume is that even without using dma the dvdburner can shunt more than enough data over the IDE bus), the difference was that when I wasn't using dma the amount of cpu usage as system (according to top) was pegged at around 60-70% of cpu with the idle time at about 40-30% and a load average of around 0.89 and when using dma the system time dropped to under 5% with an idle time of about 95% and a load average of 0.60ish. This is on an athlon 1700+ machine and a via kt400 motherboard chipset with everything connected up nicely with the best type of cables etc. etc.
So, my conclusion would be that if you don't use dma on an IDE device then your machine will use much more cpu when accessing those devices than if it wasn't, and seeing as that is why IDE devices have dma that seems perfectly sensible to me :)
Adam
-
adam＠thebowery.co.uk -
beneboy -
Syd Hancock -
Wayne Stallwood