DVD Burner Slows Down

[J-Man]

I have two external 16x DVD burners. Lately one of them, a fairly new HP LightScribe model, has become impossibly slow at both ripping and burning. It can easily take well over 2 hours to rip a DVD (KB/sec. rate under 1,000), and will only burn at a maximum rate of 4x. I can't figure out what could be causing this. My other burner (a Sony), which is older and which I've used much more, still zips along just like when it was new. Is there anything I can do to check this out and maybe figure how how to fix it?

[CWR03]

Are these USB drives, and have you made certain that they're connected to USB 2.0 ports? In this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=102034) you mentioned that you're using internal drives in an external USB enclosure. Perhaps it's the hardware of the enclosure itself that's faulty. A sure way to test would be to switch the drives between their enclosures. You also mentioned that you wanted to flash the firmware of one of the drives. Did you attempt that and notice around the same time that the read and write speeds decreased?

[J-Man]

Thanks for the reply. The two drives in question are not internal drives in an enclosure; they were purchased as external drives. (I did have another one that was as you described, but I'm no longer using that one.) The Sony is a Firewire drive, and the HP is a USB 2.0 and both are properly connected. I haven't flashed or upgraded the firmware on either of them.

[foxyshadis]

If you get a message when you plug it into windows something like "A high speed USB 2.0 device has been plugged into a USB 1.1 port", then that pretty much sums up your problem right there. Even if not, you might want to try other ports.

Otherwise, you might want to try it on someone else's computer, and if it's just as slow, rma it for another one.