How to speed up a DVD drive?

[alegator]

Whenever you insert a new DVD or CD disc in the DVD drive it takes a while (up to 20 seconds or more) for the drive to show the disc in Windows' "My Computer" as a new drive and have it ready to be read. Is there a way to decease this time? I'm asking this because I need to transfer the content of many DVD's to a hard disc.

[hello_hello]

I wish there was. If there is a solution (which I doubt) I'd be interested myself, but I think that's just how long DVD drives take to get ready. I've got several DVD drives and they're all the same. For some reason my Bluray burner seems to get ready a little faster.

[Hoser Rob]

Optical drives, of any type, are by far the slowest thing in your computer. There's not much you can do about that. Setting up dma access can help somewhat, at the cost of possible compatibility problems. Not many people bother with that.

To give an example of how slow optical drives are, my newer laptop is about 3 times as fast as my older one. Burning a dvd (imgburn of course on both) takes pretty much exactly the same time on both. I can't tell the difference.

[dougsheeran]

I'm afraid you probably won't be able to do much and I know I've also tried setting up dma access but it didn't seem to help much.

[alegator]

Thanks everyone. Well, once I transfer all those DVD's to HD I will for sure declare the end of the DVD era...at least for myself

[hello_hello]

I'm not sure why an optical drive shouldn't be using DMA mode by default. There are circumstances which would cause Windows (at least XP or earlier) to fall back to PIO mode but unless DMA is disabled in the BIOS, which is not too likely, Windows should use DMA. Whichever mode it's using it'd probably have zero effect on how long the drive itself takes to get ready after inserting a disc, but you'd notice the difference in copying speed. I'm pretty sure I've only once had an optical drive fall back to PIO mode, and I'm not sure it applies to anything other than IDE drives or SATA ports running in IDE mode.

I've got four optical drives in this PC. Two SATA drives and two IDE drives. I just checked and all four are running in Ultra DMA mode. First time I've ever looked. More info: http://winhlp.com/node/10