CD = 700 MB DVD-R = 4.7GB, well over 6 times the amount of data. Your burner probably burns CD's and DVD's at different rates because they're different formats. I just looked up one DVD burner that does 8X DVD burning and 32X CD burning. Huge difference. It could also have something to do with the quality of the media, they're rated at different speeds. If it makes you feel any better, most of the Blu-Ray burners I see out there are only 4x.

it doesnt have to do so much with a computer as it does with the dvd. a cd takes much less time to burn because theres much less space to write data too. a cd is like 650 mb. a dvd is about 4.5 gb. a gb = 1024 mb. so imagine that instead of burning a dvd, youre computer had to copy a book for you, word for word, and print it out. which would take longer? a book that was only 100 pages? or a book that was 1200 pages?

Mostly due to the amount of data being tranferred, but also that most DVD burners write at a lower rate. However, they are measured by different standards; 4x means different things for a DVD burner than a CD burner. Another factor is that there is translation work to be done. When I burn a CD, I have enough RAM to hold the entire CD image in RAM so it can translate pretty quick. When I burn a DVD, it has to do 8 times the translating and store the image to my hard drive first, and hard drives are 1000 times slower than RAM so that can take a few minutes. Given that I have a 3.4 GHz Northwood with 2GB RAM, I can do the translation work fairly quick, especially compared to my old single-core 1.8 GHz with only 768MB. Once the translation work is done though, I can burn either at almost 12MB/sec without spinning the drive up to where it sounds like a jet engine. Of course, that means that it'll take more seconds to fill a 4.7GB DVD than a 700MB CD, but that is a small price to pay for not annoying my wife with a shop-vac whirring at 3AM. The only time I take nearly that long to burn a DVD is when it must convert from AVI or WMV to something that a normal DVD player can read, and *most* of that time is spent processing, not burning.

It shouldn't take an hour. I use Nero for both, and I get times of about 4 and 7 minutes respectively.