dvd's very slow to be recognised (spin up) in xp

buachille

buachille

buachille

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Joined
28 Dec 2004
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i've always tolerated the time it takes dvd's to spin up in xp, but i've just read this in another post on ocuk and i wonder if it might be the cause of my problem

Also check in Device Manager that the drive is working in the proper mode (eg. UDMA-2 rather than PIO). But if it reads other DVDs properly and without delays or problems then it seems the Vista disc is faulty, but as said, that is pretty strange I think.
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i've been into device manager, but couldn't find how to check what mode it actually is working in (udma-2 or pio).

so could someone enlightnen me?

cheers
 
right i googled a bit more and i found it (its not in the disk properties but in ide ata/atapi properties) but i still have a question that hasn't been answered with google yet.

is pio generally better? mine is currently set to udma-2.

i've got a good and very expensive plextor dvd writer which does its stuff fine, but takes so long to spin up.

oh, i should also mention that when i archive video to disk, i often find the machine can't read the disk a few months later so i can't get the video transferred back onto the computer.

if i switched to pio would the disk be read.

i know there are no absolute answers to these questions, but i am looking for opinions and hope someone can help

:confused:
 
Leave it in UDMA-2 mode, PIO mode only appears to allow transfer rates of up to ~16MB/s, an average optical drive will work at up to ~33MB/s if memory serves. Do you have anything else on the IDE cable? If you do try taking it off temporarily and then using the drive to see if that improves it at all. :)
 
semi-pro waster said:
Leave it in UDMA-2 mode, PIO mode only appears to allow transfer rates of up to ~16MB/s, an average optical drive will work at up to ~33MB/s if memory serves. Do you have anything else on the IDE cable? If you do try taking it off temporarily and then using the drive to see if that improves it at all. :)
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thanks for the replies.

in answer to your point about having anything on the ide cable, yeah i think i do but i don't remember what. would have to have a peek inside the case and its too late at night for that,

but this is the interesting bit.

one of my dvd writers is on ide and the other is on sata, and both behave the same. i have a plextor sata and so i connected that to the sata interface instead of ide to see how it runs.

maybe i just need to accept that dvds take ages to spin up and can be unreliable with lots of digital media on them. i dunno :confused:
 
buachille said:
is pio generally better? mine is currently set to udma-2.
Click to expand...

UDMA is much better than PIO (Programmed Input/Output) - PIO uses a large amount of CPU overhead to transfer the data to / from the ATA controller, whereas DMA (Direct Memory Access) has direct access to the memory it needs, thereby bypassing the CPU.

Generally you will always want your drives in UDMA mode, however older drives do not always support this and you can cause system crashes if you force a PIO drive into UDMA mode.
 
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