My Lite-on is slow, any suggestion?

[canoner]

I have a lite-on ltd163. Recently I read somewhere that this is supposed to be a fast dvd drive. It is marketed as 16x, but my test using Sandra shows its speed is only 3.5x. Moreover, when I rip DVD, I only get speed around 2800. At the first few seconds, the speed will be very fast, something like 20000, and then it drops steadily until it is around 2800. What is the problem with my liteon dvd drive? Is there any fix? driver? firmware? anything else? UDMA is at mode 2 now.

[canoner]

I guess it depends how determined you are about resolving the problem. After posting question at various places and googling a bit, I downloaded a new firmware and flashed it. Now the drive rips at faster speed. It tops out at about 6300KB/sec. I don't think this is anywhere close to 16x it claims, but still much faster than what it gave before. What is the right speed I should expect?

[ralphthedog]

6300kb sounds pretty good to me, my cheap and nasty 16x samsung gets about the same.
Can't remember seeing faster drives but it can be hard to tell because different DVD's can rip at different speeds in the same drive.

[chainsaw135]

with my lite-on dvd burner i was getting between 8000kb and 11000kb, so it is a bit slow but not horribly like before. A friend of mine had the same drive but he was only able to ripp at 4000kb-6000kb his problem was the hardrive he had was junk. When we switched to a ata133 now he's doing around the same as my speeds.