Need help with slow reading/burning drives. Philips DVD8801 and NEC 3500AG

[Leander]

I just recently bought a Dell PC which came with a Philips DVD8801 drive, I installed a NEC 3500AG as a secondary optical drive. The problem I'm having is that the Phlips reads drives pretty slowly and the NEC burns slow as well.

I checked to make sure that both drives are using DMA instead of PIO so I know that's not an issue. I'm thinking maybe I need a driver or firmware update but I'm not sure where to find them. Any advice on how to speed up my drives would be appreciated.

[oldandinthe way]

You might need a new cable for your drives.

You might check the jumpers on the drive to be certain one drive is slave and the other master.

You might reverse the master and slave relationships for the drives.

Help on finding firmware updates is available on

www.cdfreaks.com

Check the appropriate burner forum.

[robjv1]

I had an issue with that drive as well and with Dell -- does your whole system basically slow down too? I have a P4 3.8ghz with 4 gigs of RAM and my system was going at a snails pace until I upgraded the firmware and now it works better. It was taking me something like 40 minutes to rip a Single Layer DVD-R. Now it takes about 12.

Look for the firmware at the Dell support site, I just put in my service tag to get it and it popped up as one of the upgrades.

[Krispy Kritter]

Try removing/disconnecting each of the drives (one at a time), and test to see if the speeds increase. It's also possible you may need to swap their places on the cable. Some drives prefer to be Master.