CD drives are really slow. 7 mins to read CD!

[SecretIan]

Hey guys, I dont have much time to write this post so I will try to make it quick:

I was just now trying to burn a copy of a music cd, when I noticed that it was going pretty slow (considering that I have a 52x Cd reader and a 48x CD burner). The creation of the image file alone took like 7 minutes. The program I use is nero burn, but I also tried cloneCD to see if there was a difference and there was none. I had 52x read and 48x write speed manually selected (not highest) with both programs, and I tried a few different CDs but it was still very slow. After I was pretty convinced that something was wrong with the drive, I ran one final test. I ran the nero CD-DVD speed APP from the nero toolkit, and sure enough it was reporting my avg read speed over 30 seconds to be about 12x!

I am thinking that it may be a BIOS or windows setting but Im not sure. Both LG and ASUS have terrible tech support(I dont expect replies from them for at least another week), so you guys are really my best hope. Any help would be greatly appreciated, cuz I need it. Here are my system specs:

Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4
Athlon XP 2500+ @ Stock
ASUSTeK Computer INC. A7N8X2.0 REV 2.xx (NForce2 driver ver. 2.45)
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD ASUS A7N8X2.0 ACPI BIOS Rev 1006
HL-DT-ST CD-ROM GCR-8520B (52xCD)
HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4480B (48x24x48CD/16xDVD read)
MAXTOR 6L060J3(60.04 GB)
512Mb PC3200 ValueRAM, single Channel mode (for now) CAS 3.0 4-4-7
RADEON 9800 PRO @ Stock (Driver ver. 6.14.10.6368)
IBM G78 [Monitor] (15.7"vis, s/n 55-K5150, December 2000)
Creative SB Audigy

-"Shoot coward, you will only kill a man"-

 

[lunitic]

Check in the Device Manager whether you are currently using DMA. Are you using 80-wire IDE cables? How are your drives arranged on your IDE channels?

 

[SecretIan]

Hrmm, well it turns out DMA was disabled in the device manager. After enabling it, the speed went up to about 24x... its not 52x but w/e, maybe I dont have the DMA mode set to the max. Also, for the IDE cables. I have both optical drives on one IDE cable, but like I said, I dont really know much about the BIOS settings, so I really need a newbie's guide to getting these things working at full speed. Thanks a lot for the help so far though, I am like halfway there.

p.s. maybe it is normal to only hit 24x after like 30 seconds, I dunno.

-"Shoot coward, you will only kill a man"-

 

[SecretIan]

Ok well, I just looked around in my BIOS and I couldnt find any DMA settings or anything like that. COuld someone please give me a quick tutorial on what settings could affect cd drive speed and what they should be set to? I remember with my old mobo (the a7v8x-x) I could change the ultra DMA level inside the BIOS. It doesnt look like I can do that with this BIOS, but other than that, Im not sure which settings affect drive speed and which dont. Please help me with this.

-"Shoot coward, you will only kill a man"-

 

[ytoledano]

It could also be that the disks you are trying to write to don't support very high speeds, and/or the disk you are reading from is scratched/dirty.

Roses are <font color=red>red</font color=red>, violets are <font color=blue>blue</font color=blue>, post something stupid and I won't reply to you!

 

[SecretIan]

Nah I tried three different discs for the read test... Apparently my burning media supports up to 48x, but it was really cheap so I doubt it would work very well at that speed, but none the less I would expect it to go at least 32x.

-"Shoot coward, you will only kill a man"-

 

[lunitic]

In your BIOS you'll be able to select the PIO mode or DMA mode under *i believe* 'Peripherals'. AFAIK DMA etc is usually enabled, but you better check it.

Boot Windows, go to the device manager, select IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, select Primary IDE channel, right-click & select properties, select tab Advanced Properties.
Modus should be "DMA if possible", Current Modus should be "Ultra DMA mode 5" or something like that (PIO modes are definitely not good)
Sorry, its a bit short but i gotta run!

 

[lunitic]

Good!
24x is not too bad!

About the cable setup: if you copy a disk you can either copy 'on the fly' or via an ISO image file. In both cases the complete CD needs to be transferred from the CDR to the CDRW, in the latter case via the hard disk.
The point is that if the CDR and the CDRW are on the same cable the data is first read into the computers memory and then back to the drive. If the devices are on the same cable, this data exchange can be in one direction only; if they are on different cables the data exchange can be at the same time. So it's not good to put the CDR and the CDRW on the same IDE cable. It's best in most cases to put the CDR as slave on the harddisk's IDE cable and to put the CDRW as master on the second IDE cable.

Another thing is that these ratings are exaggerated. If you look at some benchmarks you'll find that DAE-speeds are typically in the range of 16x - 24x, even with 48-speed drives! DAE stands for digital audio extraction, which is what you're doing when copying an audio CD. Now, obviously, you cannot burn a CD faster than you can read its source!

If you burn from an image file on your harddisk you should be able to write at 48x (if your media supports it). Nero can produce a very verbose logfile, in which it tells you what its doing. Very technical, but you'll see messages like "Media reported = 48x". Might give you a clue why Nero burns at a specific speed.

 

[SecretIan]

Yeah, the thing is, in windows for me, the current mode just shows DMA for drive 0 and UDMA for drive 1, no number.

In my BIOS, there is only main,advanced,security,hardware,exit and monitor tabs. I checked all of em and there is no way to check DMA mode etc. Well no obvious way to check it. This is a pretty popular mobo, someone must have experience with its BIOS...

Also, unfortunately, that 24x was only temporary, who knows why but for some reason now it is only going at 12x avg again... Im gonna look into maybe getting new firmware, but the thing is, it happens with both drives so I dunno...

-"Shoot coward, you will only kill a man"-