Cd Speeds

how do i find out wat type of cable, its not connected to hard drive too

The top image is a 40 conductor IDE cable. The lower one is 80 conductor.
The 80 has a higher data tranfer rate than the 40.

http://www.coloredhome.com/clonico/m...n_pc_51054.JPG

You should have one separate cable on each drive/ IDE and both set to master or Cable select( if your bios supports it) with the drive jumpers

my hard drive has a 80 cable and my cd drives have 40, what should i do? can i switch the cable?

It will want to restart after selecting DMA.

Is that what you mean? If it's something else, can you post a screen shot? Or type out exactly what it says.

How old and what size is the hard drive? It's remotely possible on some brands that there might be a jumper for DMA along with the Slave/Master/CS settings or on a small circuit board near those. If it's a newer WD or Maxtor it should be a system setting.

This is a shot of the IDE cable config that you Don't want >

http://freepctech.com/pc/001/images/hd10.jpg

No don't switch cables. just pick up a newer one asap. the 40 would bog down your hard drive. you need the same transfer speed on both for a good burn speed.

ok DMA works and speeds are better, but should i get a 80cable?

If your hardware can handle the speed then yeah you should. I'm not sure what the DMA mode limit is on 40 but 80 supports something like UDMA-4 or better. My old SCSI drive likes the 80 a lot better but it depends on a lot of things. In canadian $ you're looking at about $10 - $20 unless you can find a throw away from an opened box at some PC parts store.

i got the 80pin cable, now its hooked up to both my cd-drives and that is all attached to one of the ports on mobo, the hdd is attached to other port on mobo

How's your burning speeds now? Much improvement? There's not a lot more you can change now aside from a few bios settings.

now the jump from 20-40x i guess thats normal, i think the cds burn at 48x o ya, and im on a network and when i burn a cd from the other comp it takes like 20min, is that normal?

make sure cache network files is on, then it will copy the files to your computer then burn them, instead of copying from the other computer, or u could manually copy them over?