Unresponsive DVD drive freezes PC.

[TechLord]

Hello.

I noticed, that a DVD drive, which struggles with unreadable sectors on a CD, always gets unresponsive, and affects the performance of the whole PC, until the drive is switched off or the eject button is pressed.
Can anybody explain this? Why does that happen?

[hello_hello]

I don't understand the technicalities, but is it more likely to effect the performance of the whole PC when you're doing something that requires navigation via Explorer? A program's File/Open menu, or saving files, for example? It can be annoying anyway if a DVD drive has a disc in it even if it's doing nothing, because the process will probably stall while the drive spins up and reads the disc etc, but when a drive is in the middle of an anxiety attack sometimes everything does come to a halt until you hit eject to make it give up.

I have three DVD burners in this PC. Three different models and two different manufacturers and I'm pretty sure they're all prone to it, but generally a drive can moan and groan for hours without effecting the PCs performance as long I don't initiate a task that requires it to participate in some way.