P5Q-E: Super slow read speed from DVD drive?

Dee!

Dee!

Dee!

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16 Aug 2008
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Anyone else having problems with very slow read speeds from their DVD drive? I'm using the P5Q-E, it's a new board for me and so far I've had very few problems, however, I'm just trying to copy a load of software from an old backup DVD and it's taking forever. So far it's been about 10 minutes, and there's only 3GB on the DVD and it's nowhere near done yet. I never had this kind of problem on my old setup. Thoughts?

PS: DVD drive is a BenQ DW1640 (great drive).
 
Actually yes I'm suffering from this, but was going to put it down to a slightly dodgy dvd drive. Last I checked the drive was running in ata-100 though, I'll check again tomorrow though and report back - some of my game installations have taken ages.
 
The drive is a couple of years old but I swear there's nothing wrong with it, it has been flawless since the day I bought it and only started going slowly since changing to this new board and E8600 a week ago. This is one of the best IDE drives ever built and they are quite sought after these days because BenQ stopped making them. The Asus board is definitely to blame. What would have taken a couple of minutes before is now taking around 12 minutes. Writing to DVD and CD is fine, it's just reading from the drive that's slow.

I also noticed that my friend's DVD drive is slow. It is also based on an Asus board, only he uses a SATA Samsung drive. I built the system a while back and he's had lots of slows extracts and installs ever since.
 
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You haven't added / changed AV packages at the same time as well have you?

If not then can you run something like Nero CD/DVD Speed to test the read speed, i'm happy to compare for you against my Lite-on Sata, i'm sure others would do the same as well.
 
IDE issue

It may well be worth updating to a SATA drive (Sony do a nice one for £15).
I think as time goes by the quality of IDE controllers on motherboards is going to be of low priority ow that the majority of people have moved to SATA.

It may well be a BIOS issue - have you tried flashing to the latest drive?

Also if you have moved to Vista follow some tweak guides (I think if memory is correct drive search indexing slows down disk/HD times and needs turning off).

Edit - just noticed your on XP 64 .. does Benq have any drivers/firmware updates or support advise faqs
 
using an IDE DVD drive here with no problems.

I hate it sooo much though IDE cables are the devil.
 
Jumpers

Forgot about HD jumpers also - is the drive set to cable select / master or slave - if possible set to master.
 
Dee! said:
The drive is a couple of years old but I swear there's nothing wrong with it
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I didn't notice it was an IDE drive. I must say that the least durable component inside a PC (as in the one I replace most often for people) is the optical drive. If your old drive is actually ok then yeah its most likely a problem with either the old IDE cable or perhaps a conflict of some sort between the old drive and the brand new IDE controller on your board.

The normal trouble-shooting route here would be to swap out the old drive for another one or perhaps test your old drive in another machine, I would probably change the IDE cable first, knowing you that may be like 6 years old! :D

gurusan said:
I hate it sooo much though IDE cables are the devil.
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I bet you love it really! :p

I know you though gurusan, if it really wasn't to your liking you would whip out your soldering iron and transform the IDE interface into SATA, probably using one hand too! ;)
 
OK, tried switching to a different cable. With the original cable (supplied with board) I copied 3.17GB data in 18 minutes 26 seconds. With the other cable it copied the same data in 14 minutes and 8 seconds. Both of these times seem very excessive.

Jennidc: thanks for the link, I'll take a look in a sec. I think you were reading the wrong signature, btw, I'm not on XP 64, I'm on 32-bit XP SP2 which has been stripped using nLite. As for flashing the drive to the latest firmware, nope, I'm using a particular firmware that is said to give the best results with this drive. This is info from the CDFreaks forum which I used to visit quite regularly. Firmware released since the one I'm using hasn't improved read times anyway, as far as I know.

Sh4kie: Yes, I like the idea of comparing CD/DVD speed. I used Discspeed (latest version) to read this disc in the screenshot below.

discspeedmt8.gif
 
Thanks. That'd be a help. :)

I am thinking again about a SATA DVD drive, maybe a Pioneer or Samsung, unless anyone else has any particular recommendations? No Sony stuff, I've had terrible problems with their drives.
 
Well thanks, but I have a feeling this is more to do with the motherboard. The DVD drive has run perfectly for 2 years, it's reliable and flawless. Only since I changed boards has it gone weird.
 
I would advise the samsung over the sony - i have them both on the same machine (P5Q-Dlx) and they work fine. The samsung drive is a lot quieter (plus my sony one came with a warped front... still, nothing force couldnt fix!).
 
Well, that's quite an enormous difference. Wow. Cheers for the info and screenshot.

Jennidc -- yes, I would prefer the Samsung anyway, One particular Sony I paid a lot of money for (something like £180) and it was total poop. I'd like to get the Samsung SH-203.
 
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