both DVD burners have slowed down!

[ionian]

I have two DVD burners in my computer -- One is a Samsung the other is a Memorex. Both of them read at 16X. up until about two weeks ago both of them were functioning normally. Both would read 8X on a single layer DVD and read it in about five minutes while they would reach about 15.5X on a dual layer and read it in about 9 1/2 minutes. About two weeks ago both of them slowed down considerably. now most of them start reading at about 2.8X and drop to about 2.1 during the course of ripping a DVD and it takes roughly about 18 minutes to rip a single layer DVD! This is for both drives. I've tried everything -- I've checked my DMA settings, I've stopped all unneeded processes from running and I've even set windows to the "best performance" mode but I still can't seem to get the speed up on my ripping. Being that this is affected both drives I can assume that it isn't a hardware problem. Does anyone know of any software or changes that might cause DVD burners to start ripping so slowly? I'm running windows XP Pro, Pentium 3.2 with 4 GB of memory. Both DVD burners are internal, and both are plugged into the secondary IDE channel. The Samsung is the master and the Memorex is the slave. The ripping is being done with DVD decryptor.

I haven't really noticed anything else different in my system, for example nothing else seems to be running slowly including burning or any applications.

Any suggestions or ideas are greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Ionian

[setarip_old]

Please state the Titles and Regions of the specific problematic DVDs...

[jmrindaho]

I am having the same problem as ionian and there is nothing to narrow it down to a specific DVD/TITLE/REGION

[ionian]

Please state the Titles and Regions of the specific problematic DVDs...

It has nothing to do with any specific titles...it's just that both DVD drives have slowed down considerably when ripping anything - it doesn't matter what the title is.

Anyone have any clues?

Thanks again,
Ionian

[setarip_old]

If you're CERTAIN that the problem has nothing to do with specific DVDs, you might want to try replacing the IDE cable...

[Blue_MiSfit]

Roger that. Also make sure your DMA settings are correct. I've seen windows "forget" that your drive does DMA and force PIO for no apparent reason. Could be chipset drivers as well. What sort of chipset does your board use?

A good test to see if it's software muckery is to get a Linux LiveCD that has a burning app built in, (or build a BartPE windows CD) and do some tests that way. This isolates the problem better.

Definately try switching the cable too. Hungry gremlins may have taken a bite of your IDE controller as well, though I doubt it! Those are crunchy bits...

~MiSfit

[Professor_Silk]

I seem to have had the same or very similar problem as the OP. I did what this guy mentioned in this post: Solution: Slow DVD Ripping & 100% CPU.
After that I was off to the races. Incidentally, my incident seems to have been caused by my "misuse" of DVD Shrink, when I encoded an ISO directly from a disc, and not my HD like I usually do.

[HyperHacker]

I've seen windows "forget" that your drive does DMA and force PIO for no apparent reason.
It's poorly-implemented error control. If the drive starts experiencing a fair number of read/write errors then Windows drops it to a lower speed to try to stop them. Trouble being it applies to optical drives too, so one scratched disc can cause a bunch of read errors, slowing down the drive.

Also, I've had faulty RAM cause disk errors before. CD-ROMs would read about half the disc but gradually slow down and ultimately quit, and programs would randomly complain of write errors when writing to the hard disk. No other corruption was evident, but I ran Memtest86 and it spewed errors like crazy; removed the faulty stick and the drive errors stopped entirely.