Hi,

I saw some similar burning speeds with my DVD-Burner drive. I have both CD/DVD-Burner and CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drives.

I found that if I used the DVD burner, that I usually had a slower ripping speed while creating my music database master (a copy of all my Audio CDs). I ripped all of the CDs as .WAV files to a 750 GB drive (just over 600 GB now - mostly Classic Rock). The rip speed varied between 4X - 6X.

When I moved to the CD/DVD-ROM only drive, I received much better performance >40X for individual tracks, and up to 30+ for the entire CD. It always starts out slower at around 8X and builds up to 30X - 40X and I have seen 47X once. I only use the CD/DVD-ROM for operation with EAC.

I have also had similar results with a CD/DVD-ROM Lite-On Combo Model SOHC-4836V drive. The trick here might be the DVD-ROM, though I'm not sure. All of my system drives are IDE not SCSI too (except the system drive which is SATA) in my current system.

If you have the availability for an IDE drive, that may be another way to go. SCSI can be a very high performance peripheral bus. I once designed a Quad Fast-Wide SCSI card with 4 NCR-820 devices on a PCI Speedway (original 33 MHz PCI reflected wave technology specification), with full arbitration and script RAM on a proprietary 64 bit wide, 66MHz, GTL+, Split Transaction I/O Bus (STIO) host interface bus. I did the board design & layout, someone else did the code. But that was back in 1993 for an Enterprise Class Server, I'm sure that things are better nowadays.

My previous Gateway system also had a SCSI bus as well as IDE. Have you configured the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat (I don't know what Vista does with the equivalent entries for the Lastdrive= , etc). I just have XP-Media.

What SCSI card are you using?, What drivers, are you shadowing the BIOS, where is the shadow located? Is it being stepped on by another user, you know, the usual...

Ross