Intel iMac 17'' Matshita DVD Burning extremely slow!

Question

It seems i'm not the only one complaining about this problem:
I just bought a new iMac Intel 17'', just to discover it would only burn at speed 2x, instead of 8x as advertised. Yes, I have read all the advice about picking good media. The media I'm using is perfectly functional, and there's no reason why a drive wouldn't write on it at the right speed, unless the drive was of really bad quality.
How can it be that we buy such expensive computers, and are given the cheapest DVD Burners Apple could lay their hands on?!

Answer 1

I recently discovered that the Memorex DVD-R 8X media I've been using for months would only burn at 2X speed. I too was upset by this. I think my old G4 iMac was doing 4X burns. So I went looking for answers and kept coming across consistent suggestions of "try different media." I recently ran out of the Memorex media so I looked closer and followed this link <http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm> and found Memorex poorly rated. I bought TDK DVD-R 16X media today (for 25% less than I paid last time for Memorex) and my iMac is cooking away happily at 8X burn speed now.
My suspicion is that there is a great deal of empirical data to support lower burn speeds for some media in order to reduce the number of "coasters." After all, I want a reliable burn first and speed second. I bet the firmware in many drives looks at the media ID of a disk and throttles the speed to achieve the primary goal at the expense of the secondary.
BTW, the way to check media ID for yourself is to open a terminal window and enter "drutil status" with a disc inserted.