Poor Secondary IDE Slave Proformance

[bdmst16]

Just for the heck I decided to test out my optical drives using Nero CD Speed utility.

My secondary master IDE drive is a Plextor 40/12/40
My secondary slave IDE drive is a Sony 52x

The first test on the Plextor had good results, nothing great, but what I expected.

Read speeds: Ave 31X, Max 40X
Burst rate: 19MB/s <- kinda low?

Now the Sony absolutely sucked.

Read speeds: Ave 14x, Max 18x
Burst rate: 1MB/s <- what ???

I checked the IDE channel settings and sure enough the slave was set at PIO mode and not DMA. Now both are at Ultra DMA2. That sort of fixed the speed issue. The Sony now reads upwards of 40x, but the burst rate is still 1MB/s

I then tried to transfer a 30MB file. On the Plextor drive is took less than 15 seconds. The Sony took 90 seconds. Any clues on the problem here? Drive going bad, or is there a setting I'm missing? I believe I only have a 40 wire IDE cable, so I'm going to switch that out with a 80 wire cable, but that shouldn't really help since I'm not even getting DMA2 proformance.

 

[LTC8K6]

I've seen Nero report that 1MB burst on various drives. I just assumed it was wrong since I had no other speed problems.

XP will drop your drives down to PIO mode if it detects too many errors during transfers.

The transfer speed difference could be as simple as different CD's, I think. Use the same CD in both drives when you test, if you haven't already.

 

[bdmst16]

Nah, both optical drives are on the Secondary IDE channel.

I decided to test file transfer with a 291MB file. With three tests the Sony averaged at 1.78MB/s. The Plextor averaged 4.5MB/s.

Is this normal? Is the Sony drive just a piece of junk, or is something wrong here?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: bdmst16
Nah, both optical drives are on the Secondary IDE channel.

I decided to test file transfer with a 291MB file. With three tests the Sony averaged at 1.78MB/s. The Plextor averaged 4.5MB/s.

Is this normal? Is the Sony drive just a piece of junk, or is something wrong here?

You might try switching them between master and slave. Some older optical drives would kill the performance of the slave device if they were set as the master.

It could also be a problem with the cable, or the drive itself. Was it working faster before?