SATA AHCI Controller, IDE DVD RW slow speed

I have 2 IDE DVD drives (TEAC DV-W516D DVD/CD ReWriter, and TSSTcorp DVD-ROM SH-D162C DVD/CD Reader). Teac is capable of 16X DVD writting. My motherboard Gigabyte Z77-D3H has only SATA II/III slots. So I connected each IDE optical drive to motherboard's SATA II slot(s) using IDE to SATA I adapters (1 adapter per optical drive). Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit is running, and SATA AHCI is being used.

My question:

SATA I = 1.5Gbps = 187.5MB/s (adapter capability) is faster then DVD 16X writting = 177.28Mbps = 22.16MB/s.
TDK DVD+R disks tested OK (on other PC) for 16X capability.
Why is Nero reporting of only 2.4X and 4X writting speeds?

I believe ACHI mode is used for a RAID setup. You can only run in either mode not both. That might be a large part of your problem. Try switching back to SATA mode.

There is no SATA mode. SATA & IDE are interfaces. (like slots. motherboard's slots can not be changed)
SATA has Sata IDE and Sata AHCI modes. AHCI has speed related advantages, like NCQ (Native Command Queuing).

Can anyone help?

billgw said:

There is no SATA mode. SATA & IDE are interfaces. (like slots. motherboard's slots can not be changed)
SATA has Sata IDE and Sata AHCI modes. AHCI has speed related advantages, like NCQ (Native Command Queuing).

Can anyone help?

Since you're using an adaptor to run them on SATA it may not be viewing them for the full write capability. They're not plugged into an IDE, but rather a SATA with an adaptor. The adaptor may be slowing down the drive a bit because it has to go through a different interface. I'm not entirely sure, but that's just a possibility I could think of. You may want to wait for someone else that knows a bit more than I do to be sure.

When I was using this DVD writter on IDE interface (IDE slot on older motherboard), Nero used to disappear from me the high speed writting options occasionally, but I could reset it, by changing PIO mode to DMA mode (DMA reverts to PIO | Windows Problem Solver). But in SATA AHCI interfate there's no PIO, DMA, etc.

Initially, when Win7 (with new mobo) was fresh installed, Nero used to write at 16x, but not now. So ?

billgw said:

There is no SATA mode. SATA & IDE are interfaces. (like slots. motherboard's slots can not be changed)
SATA has Sata IDE and Sata AHCI modes. AHCI has speed related advantages, like NCQ (Native Command Queuing).

Can anyone help?

In your BIOS, you have SATA mode and ACHI mode.

Let's try to clear up a few things before we move on. There is such a thing as SATA mode (aside from just the ports), but it is usually referred to as Native or IDE mode, with other choices being AHCI and in some cases, RAID. IDE Mode is basically meant for older OSes so you can easily use your newer SATA drives with some backward compatibility. With Vista, Windows 7, and up, there's little reason to use IDE mode. AHCI does have benefits (and isn't related to RAID at all), but given your adapters, there's a chance they don't play nice with AHCI ports.

My suggestion is the spend the $20 to update your drive to SATA. Samsung makes plenty of high quality drives that sell for around $20. You'd solve the issue, and do away with a very old interface. It's been 5 years or so since I've used an IDE drive...so a simple update would solve your issue.