Why does it take so long to read media in optical drives??

[videobruce]

For the time optical media has been out, why does it still take so long, around 30 seconds, for a optical disc to be read or reconized by the O/S (2k)?
I understand it has to spin up (a few seconds) and read the TOC (a few seconds, or should be), but why should/does that take what seems forever? The whole computer is at the mercy of this process since you can't do anything else while this is taking place. Even opening another folder doesn't happen untill the O/S reads the disc.

It doesn't seem to matter if it is a plain old CD or a DVD movie. Neither does what type of drive it is or how old the drive is. Mind you, I run a 'lean' machine without the usual 30 or 40 processes running at startyup I see many other with.

I could understand when they first came out, but that was light years ago (in computer time).

Input please.

[saphalline]

It takes slightly less time on my XP Pro gaming machine - anywhere from 5 seconds to 15 depending on the disc type and content - but I know what you're talking about.

On the one hand, I don't know what the big deal is. Spin up the disc and read the darn thing! How hard can that be? Especially since non-copy-protected CD's aren't recognized much faster than game CD's or DVD movies, so you know the processing resources aren't being bogged down. And the latest SATA optical drives haven't fixed this slowness, so it's not the bus topology/speed that's a bottleneck. Why does it take so long?

On the other hand, have you read about optical drive technology? Those things are frickin' complex! There are now dozens of organization/"book" types for all discs, two competing DVD formats, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD movies, DVD data, DVD-R, DVD+R, dual-layer DVD's, LightScribe, Joliet, UDF 1.0, UDF 1.1... The list goes on forever! How on earth does my new DVD burner keep track of them all? Not only that, but it's amazing that my new DVD burner works so much better than my first CD burner and at a fraction of the cost!

I've found that we generally have expected our optical drives to do more things, do them faster, and be cheaper than any previous optical drive we've ever bought. After all, optical drives are ubiquitous now, right? And who in their right mind would be caught dead with a CD-ROM drive or DVD-ROM drive these days? "What's that? You don't have a burner?? What millennium are you living in!?" My new DVD burner can read all CD's, all DVD's, can burn to all CD's and DVD's, can burn to DVD-R and +R at 8x speed, has LightScribe capability, has multi-laser technology, and cost me less than $40 retail including shipping! Now tell me how much it would cost to make it significantly faster considering it's also a mechanical component. I realize that optical drives are still slow, but cut them some slack! They do so much more these days at a price that's difficult to beat, especially when you consider that a new CD-ROM drive cost hundreds of dollars back in the day, and you still needed an expansion card to install them!

[Hagar]

I assume that all those different formats has something to do with how long it takes to recognize the disk. It has to go through a lot of tests to be sure it has identified the correct disk type.

There have however been times when I wonder if there is a serious flaw in the ATA interface design or implementation, when a defective CD or even a disk inserted the wrong way can so totally lock up the PC.

[videobruce]

I'm told 'Explorer' is what 'locks up' while optical media is being read. One would think by now that would of been fixed. :rolleyes:

[mjc]

I have also noticed that many of my 'homemade' disks load faster than commercial disks...especially those that may have some form of copy protection on them...

[jlreich]

I have noticed this as well. Sometimes it happens and sometimes not. Even if it's a blank disk. :confused:

I'm starting to think the standard MS drivers are in need of updating. There what, 6 years old now?

Hmm, I will have to check this out in vista and Linux to see if it happens with those OS's as well.