CD Rom Drive too slow? September 20, 2005
Posted by Carthik in administration, commands, ubuntu.trackback
If your CR Rom drive, or the CD-RW drive, or your DVD reader/writer are slower than their stated speeds for reading or writing (burning), then you may not have DMA (Direct Memory Access) enabled on the drive in question. DMA allows for faster data access for drives that support it by effectively not using CPU time for data transfer to put it really simply.
You can check if the cd drive has the option enabled by doing a:
$sudo hdparm /dev/hdc
Where “hdc” stands for the drive in question – change this if it is different on your machine (you can find out by looking in the /etc/fstab file)
If it says “dma = 0” in the output of the command, then that means that dma is currently disabled for the drive.
You can enable it temporarily for the current session till you shutdown the computer by using the command:
$sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc
This will be reset when you reboot. You can make the change more permanent by editing the file /etc/hdparm.conf, and adding the following to the end of the file:
/dev/hdc {
dma = on
}
This will turn on dma each time you boot up the computer.
Also, if you cd/dvd writer provides for some form of buffer under-run protection, you can enable nautilus to use this when it writes to the disc by using the “burnfree” option. You can set this option by doing :
$gconftool-2 –set –type boolean /apps/nautilus-cd-burner/burnproof true
Note: Your system BIOS also gets to decide how your drives behave, so check to see if the proper options are enabled in the BIOS upon boot-up.
There! Now you should be able to read/write from optical drives at the best possible speed.
Ubuntu Blog 
erm?? did you mean:
$sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc
Thanks! I edited it – was a slip of the fingers.
Awesome, will check my BIOS new reboot. 🙂
I don’t know if its related but I tried recently booting off a Warty Live CD with little success, I noticed that the CDROM seemed awefully slow.
Also any idea what why it kept trying to disable IRQ11 too? More CDROM issues?
Try using the pci=noacpi and/or the noirqdebug options when booting. You can do this by typing “e” when the system boots up and this will bring up the option to edit the grub menu. You then have to tag the option to the end of the default boot option.
You may want to just try a newer version of Ubuntu though, I should think the newer versions must be far better, since it’s been a year now since Warty was released.
Thanks 😉
My DVD Drive was very slow (2x in CD Extraction !) I’ll see if it’s better when I’ll edit it
@+
Nope. I still get a relatively slow drive. Never had this problem under Slackware. I dont know why….
I have a 24x DVD+R/RW drive and a 52x CD-R/RW drive.
I cannot break the write/read speed of over 7x…why?
Please help!!
I’m getting the followiing error 😦
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
And so far all the stuff i found on the internet is quite complicated for a beginner. Anyone knows where this problem could come from exactly?
note a typo for the burnfree command line example. The -set and -type should be –set –type (at least in 5.10).
Found this after googling for ‘ubuntu slow dvd’ and the tip worked great.
Thanks.
You can test your settings with:
sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/hdc
(It will perform read timings)
what if u have this problem in xp?
Thanks for this! I was getting slow speeds on ubuntu for some time..
Yip I also have a slow dvd playback/burnspeed problem running an acer travelmate 2310 with 512mgs of ram
tried:
$ sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc
/dev/hdc:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
so it’s not that,
then tried:
sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/hdc
/dev/hdc:
Timing cached reads: 1832 MB in 2.00 seconds = 915.94 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 2 MB in 3.84 seconds = 533.30 kB/sec
but I’ve got no idea wether this is considered fast, slow or what
I Have a CDROM with 52 X and DVD RW with 16 X spped.
There are no problems with the DVD RW but when I play any songs from the CD ROM or HDD, and copy some other files form the CD, then irrespective of any media player , the AUio gets scratchy or distorted.
I am really fed up as I got the PC very recently.
Solutions I tried:
1) Enabling DMA.
2) Changing the CDROM Drive.
3) Changed the Digital option to Analog in the CD player as well as in the Windows Media Player.
4) Tested with various CDs.
Kindly help.
Sorry for bumb ass.
I have 52X CD-rom which runs extremly slow while playing music and copy ing date. My DMA settings in BIOS is Auto. any help???
It’s data.
This is my config with 2 IDE disks and a CD-rom in hdparm.conf:
note:
hda is primary master,
hdb is primary slave
hdc is my cdrom
open console and become root
type or copy from here and paste in console (terminal)
gedit /etc/hdparm.conf
now u see the hdparm config, go dow to the end of the text.
and use one of these lines to configure your hardware
command_line {
hdparm -q -X66 -q -A1 -q -d1 -q -u0 -q -c3 -q -W0 -q -m16 /dev/hda
}
command_line {
hdparm -q -X66 -q -A1 -q -d1 -q -u0 -q -c3 -q -W0 -q -m16 /dev/hdb
}
command_line {
hdparm -q -d1 -q -u0 -q -c3 /dev/hdc
}
save the file and restart ur PC.
good luck
I’ve got a laptop that will not play CDs or DVDs at proper speed (too slow, along with audible pops & clicks), but a ripped file will play just fine (right speed, no pops or clicks).
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks.
(Toshiba A105-S4364)
Thanks! I edited it – was a slip of the fingers.
evve It’s data.
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