IDE Optical Drives create a slow-down

J

John-pr

New Member
Hi,

I finished building and getting a new computer online a few days ago. Since it was up and running, I've noticed that any use of the two optical drives (IDE, one CD-RW and one DVD-RW) causes a slowdown with the rest of the system. The two optical drives are on one IDE cable to the motherboard, which only had one IDE plug. My hard drive is on SATA. The optical drives are the only things I kept from an old computer, and on that computer they worked perfectly - connected in one IDE channel.

Is this a common issue? Is there a driver available to fix this problem, and if so, where can I find it? As far as I know, IDE optical drives are still the standard - so this can't be a huge issue.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
 
The only way two good working drives would see a slow down would be a pull you might see on a system with a lower powered supply. The drive speeds generally wouldn't have any effect unless they were not found in the dma mode. You could try uninstalling them in the device manager to have them redetected upon the restart of the system. How old are the drives themselves?
 
As the DVD-RW burner can also read/write CD-R & CD-RW, I suggest you remove the CD-RW burner altogether, make sure the DVD-RW is configured as 'master', then see how your system runs.
 
Try a BIOS update, I remember reading something about optical drives causing system slow downs with immature BIOS on new boards.
 
A bios update certainly won't hurt there. There may be a fix in a newer version of the bios that corrects the problem you are now seeing. With optical drives all being ATA33 for the most part they shouldn't pull a system down unless a drive has a fault in it. pip22 may have been only partially correct where you may simply have to each drive separately to see if one of them is a problem drive.
 
You could also try removing the IDE device from device manager, reboot and let windows reinstall drivers for it.

edit: ah PC eye suggested this in the first post
 
meh what can I say, I only read the first line or 2 if I don't see anything interesting in someones answer :P
 
Well I'll just have to put something there then to get "noticed"! "oh crud he didn't put that there did he?" :P
(nothing like a little sarcasm in the wind there.)
 
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