Copying files to discs (live file system) is EXTREMELY slow

Thanks for a new lead! I just turned RDC off but have to go to bed now, so can't tell you if it's sped up anything. I will report back. I had no idea that Windows feature enable/disable thing existed either! I have my control panel set up like Windows XP (no categories) but maybe I need to try the "new" (to me) category setup sometime.

I've come to the conclusion that it's either super slow by design (since it's a free built in OS tool and maybe they wanted to use their resources in other areas so they neglected the disc writer), perhaps it's really going much faster than it reports, or maybe it's just some phantom problem that I'll never get to the bottom of. In the end, I can still read and write discs fine, they are just a bit slow (like 1.74-3.31mb file copy speed).

I am also looking into Imgburn or BurnAware free to make my discs but I'm not sure how that will work. If I do multisessions with one program and interchange with Windows to copy/delete new files will all be ok? You don't need to answer this but I know with BurnAware that is NOT the case. It was acting screwy and I just scrapped the test disc I used for that.

Well, I turned off the RDC, did the restart, and right now I am burning a disc and saw it reach 8.09mb/s. However once I saw that, i't liked jinxed it... the speed has been steadily dropping ever since. It tried to hold out at 7.36mb/s but then it dropped about it's 1mb less, tried to hold out there too, but then kept dropping. The remaining speed was 5.80mb/s steady.

I've come to a conclusion, if can call it that. RDC slows the drive down some, but the real problem is stemming from Windows own disc writer being poorly designed (like I had suggested above). When I send files to a disc, the drive spins up, where it's making lots of noise and such, so you can tell that it's working. However after a very short time (no idea how but less than a minute), the drive goes DEAD SILENT. I'm copying files to a disc now and if you completely covered up the blinking light and asked anybody, without opening the drive, if they thought the drive was in use, they would say no. Even the disc doesn't sound have that tiny clicking noise that you get when you browse them somtimes. This has be a Windows disc burner issue. It is the only thing controlling the drive and Nero DiscSpeed already showed us that I can reach a much higher speed if desired - so it can't be the physical disk drive itself or slow/faulty discs. I think by design it aims for noise over speed, hence the slowdown to prevent noise.

Well, I have not used packet writing for a long time now and I do have Windows native burning features turned off. But, my past experiences are the following. I used to use the program that was DirectCD, then Drag to Disk or something like that, by Roxio (which originally was some other name, I forgot that already). It used to work well, I was happy to keep my files on CDs and then DVDs and simply use Explorer to drag and drop files there. But, with "more advanced" Windows, more advanced hardware, problems started appearing. Some disks would suddenly go unreadable. Writing and reading speeds would fluctuate and often stay very low. I searched the internet and found that the whole packet writing thing is actually rather unstable. In fact, my positive experience (until I ran into problems) was rather an exception.

Now, how to get out of this situation? The question is, what are you using this packet writing for?

If you simply use your DVDs for storing data, then it's probably easier and safer (for the data) to burn then in a standard way to a DVD-R. The disks will not be re-writable, but the data will be safe enough.

If you do need to update your files there once in a while, and you don't want to have too many DVDs around, I suggest looking into external hard drives. These can be very inexpensive, they certainly have more storage space then DVDs, and there is never a problem such as what you describe. The speeds vary, but if you use eSATA connection - or nowadays USB3, then the speeds are the same as between different internal drives.

If you use the disks for carrying data around and change files on them daily, then a flash drive or an SD card may be a better solution - again, there is more space and no explorer problems. Moreover, if you want to transfer files to some other computer, then USB flash drive might be the best alternative, since almost any machine will have a USB port.

So you see, at the end of the day I solved the problem with slow packet writing by simply abandoning it. I now use more modern ways to store and move my files. In fact, even my car now has a couple of SD slot, so instead of a bunch of CDs I just have lots of music on a SD card. The price of SD cards is not too high. USB flash drives are cheap - or you can even get then free in many places.

Thus, unless you have a strong reason, why you absolutely must use packet writing, I suggest trying new ways.