I have a Lite On external USB CD/DVD-RW drive, capable of 52x CD-R burning. Every time I burn an audio disc in Linux it only achieves about 3x.

I've tried 3 apps in Ubuntu 6.06 so far: k3b, gnomebake, and bonfire. All of them get knocked back to 3x. Another odd thing is that I have to run all of them using sudo priveleges or else it won't find the external drive (/mnt/sd0 or something?).

I can acheive 48x in any Windows burning app (Nero, ONES, CDBurnerXP, etc) with this burner with the same media (48x Memorex), for what it's worth. FYI this is on a Gateway M460XL laptop, 2GHz Pentium M, 2GB RAM.

I read something about enabling DMA but I don't know how to do that. Thanks!


Jesse

To tell the truth I am not sure hdparm works on USB drives but...

try something like:
# hdparm -d1 -c1 -u1 /dev/<your burner>

I am not sure if this will solve your problem, but it may help if the bottle neck is actually getting the data to the burner over the bus.