DVD burner slows computer?

[Rudyard]

On my new PC I have a problem with the DVD/CD burner. If something (cd/dvd) is playing on the player it slows down the rest of the computer, as in things stutter and nothing is smooth.

Burning DVD's also takes along time. It is meant to be a 16x drive but is outperformed by my 2x drive on the laptop!

I am unsure if it is a setting/driver or faulty/sh*tty drive.

The model no. is TSST Corp CD/DVDW SH-W162C using driver 5.1.2535.0

It is running on a brand new 3ghz 2gig machone so it is not lack of PC power.

Can anyone help?

[redwudz]

Have you checked the DMA mode of the burner?

To check DMA/PIO mode within Windows:

Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.

From there, right click on one of the channels and choose 'Properties>Advanced Settings'. All drives should be DMA mode. The 'Current Transfer Mode' for Hard drives is usually DMA 4-6 and DVD burners DMA 2-4, DVD ROMs usually DMA 2. If you see any in PIO mode, that can slow things down.

Changing them back may be easy or complicated. First see if you can change them in that window. If not, I usually uninstall the channel with PIO mode and let the OS reinstall it. This will usually take a reboot.

From there, if no luck, get back to us.

[SingSing]

Ek..You got one of those Samsung drive.

Copy the movie to hard drive, play it and confirm playing from the drive is a real issue.

[Rudyard]

Thankyou, ill try the suggestions tonight and post back with results.

[bevills1]

Burners or any optical drives should be on channels separate from hard drives, and some drives instruct to set either as master or slave. Make sure drive is set per instruction if that's specified in documentation, and connect burner on channel separate from hard drive if it isn't already.

[SingSing]

Rudyard may actually has a broken DVD drive. I have the same DVD drive in a new Compaq PC causing havoc. Takes 3 swaps to get one to work, and find out the amount of these samsung drives got returned, and re-sold as refurnished by microcenter, and get returned again.

[Rudyard]

Ok I checked the DMA modes as advised above.

Everything was set to DMA except 1 channel but The only option I had to change it was 'DMA mode if available'

But it still says current access mode PIO. (So i assume DMA isnt available?)

But also I have no idea if that is the DVD drive or not. It just says primary channel (i think there was 2) and secondary channel (2 again I think) but doesnt actually say what is on what channel so I dont know what I am changing.

How do I find out which one is actually the DVD drive?

XP home SP2 btw.

Thanks again.

[SingSing]

Your Hard drive are mostly UDMA 5 or 6. So your TSST Drive has to show as a UDMA mode 2, when you make that channel "DMA if available". If you just got the PC or the Drive, it may be time to return it.

[redwudz]

You could download Nero Info Tool and it will tell you which drive is running in PIO mode. http://www.cdspeed2000.com/

But it doesn't really matter. None of them should be in PIO mode. Go back to Device Manager and right click on the problem channel and choose, 'Uninstall'. The computer will replace the channel and it should change to DMA. You may have to reboot to complete this.

This won't cause any damage, it just lets Windows reset the mode. If this doesn't work, either the drive has a problem or you need to make a registry change. But try the easy 'Uninstall' method first. The channel switching to PIO mode is common with a drive if it has 6 consecutive read failures. It's a 'feature' of Windows. It does slow down the drive considerably.

[Rudyard]

Thanks SingSing and redwudz, I will again when I get home. I was a bit nervous about uninstalling but if I wont damage anything then Ill do it.

And it is new so it should be under warranty - only had it about a month or so.

Will post back with more results!

[Rudyard]

Just one other thing that may trigger a reason, I noticed when burning DVD's using nero that the 'used read buffer' is at 100% the whole time. Could this indicate something?

[valvehead]

Just one other thing that may trigger a reason, I noticed when burning DVD's using nero that the 'used read buffer' is at 100% the whole time. Could this indicate something?

This is normal. It should remain at 100% until the last few moments of the burn process. I believe the read buffer is the section of RAM being used by Nero to cache data from the HDD (or other drive) to be sent to the burner.

[Rudyard]

Problem solved!!

After uninstalling the channel and letting it reinstall on reboot, windows set it to DMA mode and it now runs at incredible speeds and has no effect on the running of other programs anymore.

Just for some understanding could someone please explain why the PIO setting would ever be used?

I would also like to extened a big thankyou to all who helped me fix this as I couldnt have done it otherwise and most likely would have put up with it or had to pay a shop to fix it for me. It is really appreciated so thankyou.

[redwudz]

In this case, PIO mode is a slow speed transfer setting used by the OS when DMA fails. As I mentioned, after 6 consecutive tries to read a disc, the OS defaults to PIO mode in the hope that the data can still be read at the slower rate. But this default to PIO mode causes more problems than it's worth, IMO. It's just the OS's attempt to keep reading data, no matter what.

It's usually caused by trying to read a corrupted disc. If you have a slowdown in reading discs, the mode the drives channel is set to is the first thing to check. Unfortunately, you usually have to manually reset the channel to get back to DMA mode.

Sometimes even deleting the channel won't do a reset, then you have to go into the registry and make some changes.

This is probably some better info on the DMA/PIO mode settings problem: http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm

[bevills1]

Some older drives won't run correctly in DMA mode which is why PIO mode is default. I have a very old 4 GB hard drive that runs normally only in PIO mode for example.