Why does it take so long to read media in optical drives??

For the time optical media has been out, why does it still take so long, around 30 seconds, for a optical disc to be read or reconized by the O/S (2k)?
I understand it has to spin up (a few seconds) and read the TOC (a few seconds, or should be), but why should/does that take what seems forever? The whole computer is at the mercy of this process since you can't do anything else while this is taking place. Even opening another folder doesn't happen untill the O/S reads the disc.

It doesn't seem to matter if it is a plain old CD or a DVD movie. Neither does what type of drive it is or how old the drive is. Mind you, I run a 'lean' machine without the usual 30 or 40 processes running at startyup I see many other with.

I could understand when they first came out, but that was light years ago (in computer time).

Input please.

 

It's just a system thing.

 

Yea, ok......
that didn't answer the question.

 

Ok the speed of your system, all the processes you don't know about running in the backround, The health and speed of your readers / burners. The health of the discs. The speed of you hard drives. The speed of you memory, The speed of you ATA buss. Which ultra dma numbers you have. And about 20 other things. It's normal.

 

i don't know what you're doing, but it never takes more than a few seconds on my machine to read discs...30 seconds is unacceptable.

 

Which is the reason for the post.

 

has it always been slow like this or is it a recent occurrence?

 

In just about every machjine I have used the time is at least 15 seconds (for a CD) and 20-40 seconds for a DVD. Not just this one.

 

This guy seems to know why it happens...

http://searchwincomputing.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid68_gci1196457,00.html

I know this is pretty basic, but I enjoyed the read. The section on erasing r/w disks is particularly interesting.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/cd-burner.htm

 

I looked in the Bios and it was set to 'Auto' for the O/S to set the xfer mode. Then I looked in DM and the nForce2 drivers were set for the Bios to set the speed. Ok, which is better??

Separate question; The TOC is closest to the center of the disc?

 

nForce 2 chipsets typically support UDMA mode 4 for those drives that have it. Make sure you use an 80pin ribbon cable for the CD/DVD drives. Then, if the drives do support mode 4 (66MB/s ATA) you can either manually set it in the BIOS, or the Device Manager.

 

I thought the 80 pin cables were just for HDDs' since optical drives are slower. IOWs' no improvement since that isn't the bottleneck.

 

40pin IDE cables max out at ATA33 spec. What drive models are we talking here?...chances are they do support the ATA66 spec, which you will need an 80pin cable for.

 

Optical drives. They all are ATA-33 aren't they??

 

Surprisingly enough, some newer drives like the LiteOn ones we use, since the 1633S model, support UDMA mode 4, or ATA66. Unfortunately, the board we're using in this machine, only supports DMA 2 (ATA33) for CD/DVD drives.