My DVD rewriter has slowed to a crawl.

[kandinsky63]

Hi

I have two Optiarc DVD RW AD-7170A drives in my PC -one is master and other
is slave.

Today I decided to copy a DVD using the slave drive. However,I noticed that
the speed of the slave drive was being limited to ~2mb/s. When I tried with
the master drive, it was able to read at more than 10mb/s. Previous to this,
both drives were reading and writing at approximately the same speeds.

To try and cure the problem I uninstalled both drivers and reinstalled on
boot-up, even switched the cables to the drives. Unfortunately this did not
make the slave drive operate at the same speed as the master. This approach
had worked before but not on this occasion.

I then decided to swap them over, the master drive becoming the slave and
vice versa. When I tried to read the DVD, the drive that was previously the
slave but now the master drive was able to read at speeds over 10mb/s.

I have tried everything that I could think off to reset the slave drive to
read/write at the same speed as the master.

Anybody got any ideas as to what is going on and how I can resolve the
issue?

thanks

 

[Paul]

Hi

I have two Optiarc DVD RW AD-7170A drives in my PC -one is master and other
is slave.

Today I decided to copy a DVD using the slave drive. However,I noticed that
the speed of the slave drive was being limited to ~2mb/s. When I tried with
the master drive, it was able to read at more than 10mb/s. Previous to this,
both drives were reading and writing at approximately the same speeds.

To try and cure the problem I uninstalled both drivers and reinstalled on
boot-up, even switched the cables to the drives. Unfortunately this did not
make the slave drive operate at the same speed as the master. This approach
had worked before but not on this occasion.

I then decided to swap them over, the master drive becoming the slave and
vice versa. When I tried to read the DVD, the drive that was previously the
slave but now the master drive was able to read at speeds over 10mb/s.

I have tried everything that I could think off to reset the slave drive to
read/write at the same speed as the master.

Anybody got any ideas as to what is going on and how I can resolve the
issue?

thanks

Compare an ordinary data DVD to a video DVD, and see if the speed is different.
You could, for example, test with Nero CD/DVD Speed tool, and see if a video
DVD behaves different than a data DVD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riplock

If you don't have a tool to test with, maybe this would work. I have
an older version that came with an OEM version of Nero (came with the
burner).

ftp://ftp6.nero.com/tools/DiscSpeed.zip

That tool, should look roughly like this. The red line, marks where the
original burn stopped. If you didn't fill the disc, the whole thing
cannot be benchmarked. The tool will read the data, up to where the
red line is. It will read it, as fast as possible.

http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5894/discspeed.png

*******

Now, there is another possibility. The drive could have slipped into PIO mode,
where the processor transfers each word of data individually, without benefit
of hardware DMA to automate the transfer. That might change the shape of your
Nero test result, as the transfer rate curve could be "bus limited".

Paul

 

[kandinsky63]

Unless I have misunderstaood your reply, surely , your solution/advice
should apply to BOTH DVD drives. If you read my original query , when i
change the configuration of the drive from slave to master, it begins to
operate correctly. When I change it back to 'slave' , the read/write speed
is limited to ~2mb/s and not the expected >10mb/s. The same applies to the
other dvd drive.

 

[Paul]

Unless I have misunderstaood your reply, surely , your solution/advice
should apply to BOTH DVD drives. If you read my original query , when i
change the configuration of the drive from slave to master, it begins to
operate correctly. When I change it back to 'slave' , the read/write speed
is limited to ~2mb/s and not the expected >10mb/s. The same applies to the
other dvd drive.

OK, so I did mis-understand your question.

On modern computers, there should be no interaction between devices with
respect to speed. If you switch the drives around, master or slave,
it should not affect their rate. So I cannot explain the different
that way, as a bus issue.

Have you checked to see what the claimed operating mode is for each
drive ? Are they both DMA or are they PIO ?

Are you using an 80 wire cable ? Sometimes, that is enough to give
better quality signal transmission.

On some older systems, there do seem to be issues with a difference
in behavior between master and slave, but I've never seen any
technical explanation for why that would be. On a modern
system, if one device wanted to run UDMA5 and the other one
UDMA4, that is supposed to be OK. They both don't need to run
at the same speed. And one drive should not "drag down" the other.

Paul