Strange DVD-ROM Problem

[Board of Command]

I use two optical drives in my computer: LG GSA-H10N burner and LG GDR8163B reader. The problem is with the reader. It's a 16x DVD-ROM drive, however...

I've used it for over a year and it has been excellent. Recently I noticed that it was reading DVD disks really slowly when I tried to copy my Haruhi episodes onto my hard drive. The first clue was the noise: there was none. The drive was spinning slow enough that it was completely silent. I'm sure you all know how loud DVD-ROM drives are when spinning at full speed. The second clue was obvious: the actual transfer speed.

I ran a benchmark on Nero CD-DVD Speed and it started at 2.5x, which obviously is lower than what it should be (around 6x). After finishing 2.5 GB, the speed ended at 5.5x (when it should have been around 12x).

I've looked all over the net for similar problems but couldn't find any. The only "similar" problems were people running the drive in PIO mode instead of DMA mode. That isn't my problem because I'm in DMA mode and it's just going really slow, plain and simple. The drive simply isn't spinning fast enough.

My burner still reads all disks at the proper speed and generates the proper level of noise, so it's not an issue of my power supply not pumping out enough juice. I'm tempted to swap in a different drive and see how it performs, as well as how this drive performs on another machine. This is the first time a computer problem has truly mystified me...

PS: This isn't just with my Haruhi disk. It reads all disks like this.

[Kraco]

Might be a stupid question, but did you upgrade firmware before the speed drop? Whilst I have never had an LG drive, I know firmwares in general exert control over how fast the drives read, especially home-burnt content, since those are more error prone than factory pressed disks due to the inherently weaker signal.

Also, do you have somewhere a control that would allow you to set how fast the reader reads dvdrs? Maybe the LG firmware allows such a manual control. You could have set it to careful error free mode at some point, possibly via some program, and now just don't remember it.

Well, of course it could be just beginning to get broken as well. Drives are bloody intelligent things nowadays, dropping their speed lower and lower if they can't read something. So I suppose there could be something wrong with the drive, and thus it drops the speed to compensate. I'm no engineer, though, so I don't know how plausible that is.

[complich8]

My guess is either a dirty (dusty probably) lens, or some other focus issues that are causing it to have to go back and re-read or generally slow down reading. Tried a CD lens cleaner?

Sometimes, a cheap optical drive's focus degrades over time due to vibration during normal usage, too (Thompson drives in the early-generation xboxes, for example, would encounter random read errors after a couple months or couple years of use). So it could be that.

If it turns out to be that, I wouldn't sweat it too much ... all normal-ish optical drives are cheap these days... seems like the going rate for dvd burners is around $30 (least, that's what I paid for my drive about a week ago).

[Board of Command]

I put this drive in another machine and it's still the same, so I guess it's something wrong with the drive. I'll get some lens cleaner if it isn't too expensive.

PS: I know it's not a firmware issue.

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Mystery solved: there is no problem with the drive. It just doesn't read burnt disks very well because I just tested using a pressed disk (Thief 3) and everything was normal. Weird, because I only noticed the slow speeds just now and I've owned this drive for over a year.