Heat issues with DVD-ROM drives?

[Lord Sandwich]

Just noticed recently that my Pioneer 16x drive heats up discs an awful lot--several hours of continuous playback will actually start to cause skips, in fact. Moving the drive below it one more step down seems to have improved things slightly, but not that much.

Anyway, my real concern is if there's any danger of a disc getting damaged from too much internal heat. If so, are there any solutions? Will slowing down the drive with CD Throttle help any?

[nikthebak]

Originally posted by Lord Sandwich
Just noticed recently that my Pioneer 16x drive heats up discs an awful lot--several hours of continuous playback will actually start


I have a Pioneer DVD-A06S (16X, the slot-loading model) drive and I could easily warm up my house with it. You do not have a malfunctioning drive. Pioneer 16X's, esp. slot-loading models, unfortunately generate way more heat than DVD readers usually do.


Anyway, my real concern is if there's any danger of a disc getting damaged from too much internal heat. If so, are there any solutions?


When I first smelled burning plastic from my Pioneer I e-mailed Pioneer's tech support with the exact same question. They answered that no, the heating is normal and shouldn't damage discs/drive or affect performance in any way. Untrue and sad, especially because all other DVD drives in market seem to be running pretty cool. I actually heard of a bloke who broke his A06 and almost burned his entire motherboard just trying to copy Baldur's Gate (1000's of small files) :eek: !

Will slowing down the drive with CD Throttle help any?

Yes. If you have a 116, 106 or A06 drive, you can use this speed control utility http://www.pioneer-eur.com/support/utility/dvdutils_103.zip. You can toggle your drive between "performance" and "silent" modes. Silent mode reduces CD-ROM throttle to ~20X and DVD throttle to ~4X (yes, this bugger reads DVD-Videos at maximum speed even when you're just watching them :mad: ) thus really reducing heat production. When watching DVDs in silent mode, the discs hardly warm up at all.

With the speed control utility, the recent Pioneer DVD-ROMs very nearly don't suck. Performance mode for ripping, silent mode for everything else.

[Lord Sandwich]

Hey, thanks a lot! So far I've only been using the universal speed control utilities, and none of them seem to be able to get the drive down to less than 19x. Which is about 18x more than I need for DVD playback. Can't wait to use the proprietary utility.

I still love my Pioneer slot-loader dearly, but it looks like I'm gonna have to buy some exotic Taiwanese fan system to keep it happy. :D

[theReal]

With enough airflow through the case, all your cdrom drives are cooled very effectively.
I've also had CD's almost molten in my Pioneer DVD in an Epac case - now I have a chieftec with two 8cm case fans and the cds never get more than hand-warm.

[Lord Sandwich]

No case fans in my machine, so I took off the side panels. :)

Dunno why, but most of the ATX 2.0 cases from Taiwan--at least the ones I've encountered--don't come with extra fans. They're mentioned in the motherboard BIOS, but I've never actually seen one.

Guess that's why they sell so many cooling accessories here in Asia.

[theReal]

actually AMD says you need to have an extra case fan for their athlon cpu's. For some Athlons you don't need extra case fans, but in my case we're talking of a T-Bird 1400@1512, 1.84V core, memory at 288MHz and 2.9V ...
That thing badly needs case fans, that's why I bought this tower:
http://www.thetatech.de/h_case05.jpg

[Lord Sandwich]

Guess that would explain why the Duron I bought reached temperatures of 70 degrees and up. No wonder Intel still has a monopoly in humid Asian countries! :D