Using k3b, growisofs or any other DVD recording tool I only get beteen
1.5 and 2.0 x recording speeds. My DVD drive is a Sony 8X dvd+ - rw.

I used hdparm -d1 /dev/hdd to set DMA on for the drive but still get the same speeds.
I checked the DMA with hdparm /dev/hdd to make sure the DMA was on, here's the output;

HDIO_GET_MULTCOUNT failed: Invalid argument
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 1 (on)
readahead = 8 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument

Can someone tell me why I am getting such slow speeds.
BTW, I also bought 8X speed blank media.

Thanks

You may need to update cdrecord to a newer version. What version are you running? Check out the changelog on the cdrecord project page here: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/cdrecord.html

I'm not using cdrecord to burn DVD's I'm using growisofs and or k3b which uses growisofs.

cdrecord is one of the dependencies for K3b as well as mkisofs. K3b uses both cdrecord and mkisofs (which includes the component growisofs).