Why does "Windows 10" Constantly "Grind" my BD-R Optical Drive?

[TheDarkKnight]

I just burned a custom BD-R disc recently. When Windows tries to read the disc, it seems to do so okay, but it keeps reading the disc constantly and I don't understand why. You can hear it spin up and down and up and down and it's very annoying from a noise perspective. It's not that it's really loud but it's noticeable and I'm just sitting here scratching my head saying, "Okay, why?".

Read the damn TOC, cache it on my hard drive or in my system memory and then spin the drive down and !@#$. It's pretty simple in my eyes but I don't know the complexities of the matter so is there a good reason for the constant grinding?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've noticed something similar. I guess, part of the problem is, there's no "interrupt" for the drive to notify the controller than there is now media present. The host has to poll the drive using the controller, and read the drive data. Windows' polls the drive every second. It sounds weird to me, though, because you can see the HDD light on the front of the case blinking every second for a brief moment, if you have a CD/DVD/BR drive installed.

But if you have a disc in the drive, I don't really see why it would spin up and spin down constantly. Generally, I think that it keeps spinning. Reading the "drive identify" data, to detect "media present", shouldn't require spinning up the drive. So it's either a firmware issue, or a power-management spin-down setting issue, which can also be a firmware issue if it's too aggressive.

I would look into a mfg utility to control drive spin-down timeout. There was a program called CDSpeed2000, that became Nero CD/DVDSpeed in their suite, that can do this, I think. So get a hold of Nero, or look on the drive mfg's web site for a utility.

 

[TheDarkKnight]

I've noticed something similar. I guess, part of the problem is, there's no "interrupt" for the drive to notify the controller than there is now media present. The host has to poll the drive using the controller, and read the drive data. Windows' polls the drive every second. It sounds weird to me, though, because you can see the HDD light on the front of the case blinking every second for a brief moment, if you have a CD/DVD/BR drive installed.

But if you have a disc in the drive, I don't really see why it would spin up and spin down constantly. Generally, I think that it keeps spinning. Reading the "drive identify" data, to detect "media present", shouldn't require spinning up the drive. So it's either a firmware issue, or a power-management spin-down setting issue, which can also be a firmware issue if it's too aggressive.

I would look into a mfg utility to control drive spin-down timeout. There was a program called CDSpeed2000, that became Nero CD/DVDSpeed in their suite, that can do this, I think. So get a hold of Nero, or look on the drive mfg's web site for a utility.

I may have mis-stated the actual situation. When I said spin-up and spin-down constantly I meant to describe it as a continuous event. In other words, my suspicion is that this occurs most frequently as a result of the drive struggling to read the media properly so that it has to engage in multiple retries. This is just my theory though.

Another thing I've noticed about my optical media, though, is that the burn software I've been using (for years now), ImgBurn, seems to be much better at reading Optical Media than the Windows File Explorer application itself. One thing that bugs me is that the ImgBurn software allows 128-character volume labels (64 if you want UniCode) and Windows 10's File Explorer still only recognizes the first 32-characters.

So, I'm just not sure if this is poor quality media (Optical Quantum which I have a very high successful burn rate using) or the fact that the File Explorer just sucks in comparison to the ImgBurn software.

I'll continue to monitor the situation by making more careful observations about what's going on when and in what software I'm using at the time.