Hi! I am trouble getting an external DVD-Burner from Samsung (SE-S184M) connected to windows properly. My first approach was to simply connect it to the mac and then transfer the USB device to parallels (by selecting the appropriate "mass storage device" from the USB list). This works fine and I now have two DVD drives, the built in one and the Samsung. I can also fire up any burn software, select the drive, everything is recognized correctly, everything seems fine. When I start to burn a DVD-R on MAX or even only 8x speed (the drive and media support up to 16x (or 18x)) the burner spins up to full speed and starts to write. This causes the device buffer to run dry nearly immediately, while the programs buffer is still at 100%. Then the buffer gets filled up and the drive continues to write, but it drops again. It all ends up in the drive slowing down to 1x speed, at which it can continuously write data to the media, while the buffer is fluctuating between 10%-100%. Clearly there is some problem with continuous data transfer to the drive. Parallels supports USB 2.0 now, so this should not really be the issue, or is it?. Just to clear things up, the drive and media support the speed, hard disk speed and fragmentation is out of the question, as the RAM buffer stays at 100%. If I connect the drive to Mac OS X directly I can burn disks at 8x with no problems, even from the same disk source. I am writing the DVD from parallels using a shared folder source, but that should also not be the problem. My second approach, after I found out that this is possible, was to disconnect the internal DVD drive and connect the Samsung one instead. At first the drive wasn't in the list, so I never thought this was possible. To be clear: I connect the drive to parallels using cd CD/DVD menu opposed to the USB menu (mass storage device) now. With this connection method I can burn faster, even going up to 6x-8x speeds. Still, the data transfer is very unforgiving, if I do acces other files in parallels or get some load on parallels, the buffer runs dry again and write speed drops (and will never be increased past 4x again). Again the memory buffer wasn't dry as the device buffer dropped. Obviously this connection method does not allow to use both drives in Parallels, which is bad as well. No matter how I connect the Samsung drive to my machine, using USB menu, CD/DVD menu or even OS X itself, I can't get lightscribe to work. I can install host drivers both on OS X and on windows and both systems detect the drive and claim everything is ok. But when it comes to the actual writing I get crashes/hang ups/freezes choose something. On windows, where I thought I had the best chances using the software that came with the drive, I get the infamous "connection error". Does anyone else have experiences with DVD burner and parallels? Or concerning USB connected devices in general? Thanks, Jaina
