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NEC 3550a DVD performance problem

J

justincranford

Junior Member
Here is my system configuration:

AMD Athlon 64 3700+
MSI 7207 w/ BIOS 3.4 (Nvidia 6150+430 chipset)
2x512MB DDR400
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2
NEC 3550a rev 1.05 w/ 80-pin IDE cable (Primary IDE Master)
3.5" Floppy
Win2k + SP4 + all updates


My NEC 3550a DVD writer is running really slow, too slow for it to be considered normal. The drive takes 35-40 minutes to dump the contents of a DVD+R SL data disc
to the hard drive. I expected results in the neighbourhood of the NEC 3540 reviewed on this site since the 3550 replaced it. The 3540 only took 355sec or 5 min 55 sec. Compared that to my 35-40 minutes!

I ran the transfer rate benchmark in Nero CD-DVD Speed and it reported my drive ran in CLV mode with constant read speeds of 14.6x for CDs and 1.59x for DVDs across the entire media. That is not at all what I expected. First off, why would the drive run in CLV mode instead of CAV? Second, why such slow transfer rates?

The separate DVD and CD tests both show the drive transferring data at about ~2.2MB/sec. That is way below the 33MB/sec max for the PATA/33 interface. There are no other IDE devices in my system and it is set up as master on the primary IDE channel, so I don't think the IDE interface is the limiting factor. Then again maybe it is.

Alternate possible causes: firmware, NVidia 6150+430 chipset, MSI 7207 BIOS 3.4, motherboard driver, Windows 2000 driver, DVD speed throttling.

It makes no sense to me why the NEC 3550a would run in CLV mode at 1.59x DVD speeds and 14.6x CD speeds. Please help. I need advice on how to diagnose the problem and fix it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Justin
 
I ran some tests and it seems DMA is turned off, but the W2k driver does not have an option to turn it on. What gives?

I was able to boot with a Live Knoppix CD and run some tests with hdparm. That Linux utility lets you see the settings and change them. The tests showed the transfer rate went from 3.6MB/sec when DMA was off to 8.3MB****** when it was turned on.

Why does the W2k driver not offer this option? I checked and the WinXP cdrom driver is missing the DMA option too. It seems pretty silly Microsoft would exclude this feature. Can anyone else confirm this problem? Does anyone have a workaround?
 
Windows 2000 and XP both hide their DMA settings in the Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel drivers, not in the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drivers where I expected. There is a lot of misleading documentation out there on the Internet which pointed me to the wrong place.

Anyway, the "transfer mode" setting in the IDE Channel drivers defaulted to "PIO only" instead of "DMA if available". It seems like Win2k and WinXP both fail (or refuse?) to detect if drives support DMA. After I made the changes manually both drives ran at full speed.

Problem solved.
 
Originally posted by: justincranford
Windows 2000 and XP both hide their DMA settings in the Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel drivers, not in the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drivers where I expected. There is a lot of misleading documentation out there on the Internet which pointed me to the wrong place.

Anyway, the "transfer mode" setting in the IDE Channel drivers defaulted to "PIO only" instead of "DMA if available". It seems like Win2k and WinXP both fail (or refuse?) to detect if drives support DMA. After I made the changes manually both drives ran at full speed.

Problem solved.
Click to expand...

yay 🙂
 
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