For some reason Windows Explorer and everything else dependent on it runs very slowly and the cursor stutters whenever there is nothing in the DVD burner. There is no problem when a CD or DVD with data is in the drive. It is as if the drive is waiting on a disc. Disabling the drive also (temporarily) solves the problem. I never had such problems with IDE optical drives, but this system is all SATA now. Has anyone a similar experience and ideas towards resolution? Thanks.
Optical Drive Woes
- Thread starter LunarMist
- Start date
My guess is that you have an application that is trying to continiously access the drive. Does the same behavior occur when in safe mode? If safe-mode helps then try using msconfig to temporarily eliminate what is being auto-loaded, one item at a time, till you can ID the specific cause and address it.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
Disable NeroCheck. I've often seen it take 99% of the processor by itself for no reason on customers' boxes. If you have Nero installed, open the task manager and see if you have one svchost.exe process taking +95% of the CPU. If yes, execute msconfig as Mark wrote and disable NeroCheck.
If you don't have Nero installed, then I wasted 2 minutes of my life.
If you don't have Nero installed, then I wasted 2 minutes of my life.
Thanks. I tried disabling/uninstalling various applications to no avail. Then I tried a clean installation of XP32 and it does the same thing. 
Is it normal that the drive shows up as a DVD-RAM when the tray is empty? Perhaps there is something in Windows itself, though I turned off the CD writing capability.
Is it normal that the drive shows up as a DVD-RAM when the tray is empty? Perhaps there is something in Windows itself, though I turned off the CD writing capability.
ddrueding
Fixture
Well, since we all know XP doesn't do that on every machine, it sounds like a hardware issue. I assume pulling the optical completely fixes the issue as well?
Now I understand. The optical drive was plugged into one of the purple ports, not an orange port. (Presumably the purple ports originate from an add-in controller rather than the ICH.) On an orange port the drive behaves normally.
There is such a mess of SATA cables in the ancient computer case from the 10 hard drives that it is confusing as to which device connects to which port.
There is such a mess of SATA cables in the ancient computer case from the 10 hard drives that it is confusing as to which device connects to which port.
ddrueding
Fixture
There is such a mess of SATA cables in the ancient computer case from the 10 hard drives that it is confusing as to which device connects to which port.
I'm still looking for backplanes/enclosures that support the multi-lane connector that 3Ware uses in their RAID cards. 75% less cables is a good thing.
Stereodude
Not really a
I wouldn't think that should matter.
Usually if the controller does not support the drive, it does not function or performance suffers. In this case it passed all the Nero read/write tests just fine up to 18x, so I did not think about that possibility.
I'm hoping for WD 2TB drives soon. Perhaps reducing the number of hard drives will help.
sechs
Storage? I am Storage!
Do you hate yourself that much?
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
From what I read on the Net, Seagate's 1TB and 1.5TB have a lot more issues than Western Digital's Terabyte drives right now. I don't know about HGST and Samsung.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
I've read the same, where certain 1TB and 1.5TB 7200.11s are bricking themselves during their startup sequence.
