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.