sata cdrom drive; very low read/transfer speed

**angryhomer17** · May 11th, 2008

My sata cdrom drive (Samsung SH-S183L) is very slow at reading discs. This is causing problems when copying discs to the hard drive or when burning.

For example, it took me 86 seconds to copy ~750 MB worth of data from my sata cdrom to my sata hard disk in krusader. That is ~8.72 MB/s.

It appears that cp is somewhat faster. For the same files it took 50 seconds to copy 750 MB. That's 58% better or ~15 MB/s.

From my reading it appears that either:

a. sata cdrom drives do not support dma
or
b. sata cdrom drives already use dma and it cannot be turned on or off

Here is what hdparm shows for speeds for my cdrom and hard drives:

cdrom

Code:

~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/scd0 

/dev/scd0:
 Timing cached reads:   6242 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3123.30 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   20 MB in  3.08 seconds =   6.49 MB/sec

main hard drive

Code:

$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda1:
 Timing cached reads:   7390 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3698.19 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  188 MB in  3.00 seconds =  62.64 MB/sec

secondary hard drive

Code:

$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb1 

/dev/sdb1:
 Timing cached reads:   7682 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3844.89 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  238 MB in  3.01 seconds =  79.20 MB/sec

As you can see both of the sata hard drives have reasonable buffered disk reads while the cdrom is a measly 6.49 MB/s. And that is an improvement from the ~2.50 MB/s I was getting before doing this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...a+cdrom+slow#9

Here is what happens when I try to set dma:

Code:

~$ hdparm -d1 /dev/scd0 

/dev/scd0:
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
 HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

and this is hdparm for the drive

Code:

$ hdparm /dev/scd0 

/dev/scd0:
 IO_support    =  0 (default) 
16-bit)
 HDIO_GET_UNMASKINTR failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
 HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
 HDIO_GET_KEEPSETTINGS failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
 readonly      =  0 (off)
 readahead     = 256 (on)
 HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

Burning a disc with brasero gives read speed of about 5.5x or ~7200 KiB/s. With k3b I am getting a copy speed of about 430 MB/min or 7.16 MB/s

Just creating a cd image for a standard 12 track audio cd takes just over 6 minutes.

This is way too long to wait on a machine more than capable of faster speeds. It seems like 8.04 still has some problems to be worked out.

Any suggestions?

**angryhomer17** · May 13th, 2008

anybody? dvd rips taking over 30 mins is no fun.

**mc4man** · May 14th, 2008

My sata cdrom drive (Samsung SH-S183L) is very slow at reading discs

It may have 'riplock' which will impact ripping speeds particularly commercial dvds
ck. here - http://club.cdfreaks.com/f105/sh-s18...ng-cds-222620/
there's probably a review on main site somewhere
there may be a firmware fix here http://www.rpc1.org/ - site is down for a bit - if a firmware is available usually needs to be done in windows

**angryhomer17** · May 14th, 2008

Thanks. This looks like it will prolly help. Hopefully, I can get it to run under wine. Will try out once I can get the frimware, after the server issue is fixed.

**mc4man** · May 14th, 2008

If there is a firmware do some reading and or post in that sites forum, borking a firmware flash can kill your drive. I would be hesitant to try in linux (wine or otherwise ) without specific instructions

slightly ot but same idea - all of my dvd drives can be set to booktype dvd+r, +rw to dvd-rom. I can't set the drive for this in linux (not that i'm aware of), so I set them in xp and when burning in linux the booktype is set as intended.

**angryhomer17** · May 22nd, 2008

Well rpc1's site is back up finally. I looked around for the SH-S183L firmware for a bit, but I am having trouble finding it. Perhaps you could help me out on that.

If I do decide to go ahead with the flash, do you think there would be a problem if I did the flash through Windows in virtualbox? I really don't feel like doing a native install on another partition. That and I don't have the option to use another computer, because I don't have any extra with sata on them.

So that being said, maybe I should look at adding an additional drive. What are some suggestions that are under $50 and rip well? Thanks.