Copying DVD contents to HD painfully slow...

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi,

I've got relatively current gear (Seagate & WD drives, and a Plextor DVDR
drive) but I'm finding the 90 minutes it takes to dump the content of a
DVD onto my HD unnecessarily excessive. Is it supposed to take that long
to copy 3-4 gigs worth of raw data to a HD? The target drive isn't even
the one Windows is installed on, which is supposed to help speed-wise.

What could be causing this, and how could I tweak WinXP (fully patched)
into speeding this up? I've got 4GB of ram (even though 2 are being wasted
most of the time).

Thanks.

Copying files to the Windows system disk makes no difference when
it comes to speed. Your first step in your trouble-shooting effort should
be to check the Event Viewer. You might find some interesting stuff in
there. Click Start / Run / eventvwr.exe to launch it. If you turn a blank
there, try copying a different DVD.

 

[sdlomi2]

Hi,

I've got relatively current gear (Seagate & WD drives, and a Plextor DVDR
drive) but I'm finding the 90 minutes it takes to dump the content of a
DVD onto my HD unnecessarily excessive. Is it supposed to take that long
to copy 3-4 gigs worth of raw data to a HD? The target drive isn't even
the one Windows is installed on, which is supposed to help speed-wise.

What could be causing this, and how could I tweak WinXP (fully patched)
into speeding this up? I've got 4GB of ram (even though 2 are being wasted
most of the time).

Thanks.

Are you by any chance going thru an unpowered USB hub using an external
device to transfer thru? If so, bypass it. s

 

[M.I.5¾]

Hi,

I've got relatively current gear (Seagate & WD drives, and a Plextor DVDR
drive) but I'm finding the 90 minutes it takes to dump the content of a
DVD onto my HD unnecessarily excessive. Is it supposed to take that long
to copy 3-4 gigs worth of raw data to a HD? The target drive isn't even
the one Windows is installed on, which is supposed to help speed-wise.

What could be causing this, and how could I tweak WinXP (fully patched)
into speeding this up? I've got 4GB of ram (even though 2 are being wasted
most of the time).

The one thing you should note is that the quoted read speed of the DVD drive
only applies to pre-mastered disks. It is often slower for DVD-R discs and
for many drives is actually slower than the write speed.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

How do I get there and what am I looking for?

I already gave you the recipe: Click Start / Run / eventvwr.exe to launch
it.

By the way, you're posting in the future. Fix your clock or
your time zone.

 

[mjs]

Hi,

I've got relatively current gear (Seagate & WD drives, and a Plextor DVDR
drive) but I'm finding the 90 minutes it takes to dump the content of a DVD
onto my HD unnecessarily excessive. Is it supposed to take that long to copy
3-4 gigs worth of raw data to a HD? The target drive isn't even the one
Windows is installed on, which is supposed to help speed-wise.

What could be causing this, and how could I tweak WinXP (fully patched) into
speeding this up? I've got 4GB of ram (even though 2 are being wasted most
of the time).

Thanks.

 

[M.I.5¾]

Thanks, but what am I looking for? I see nothing but "Information" type
entries during the hours I was copying files.


No, you're posting in the past. It is currently 10:28am where I am,
eastern.

No you are posting in the future. Your time zone must be set up
incorrectly, because the post I'm replying to isn't due to be posted for
another 40 minutes.

 

[LVTravel]

Funny, but my clock says it is 10:49 AM EDST. Your post that I am replying
to shows 11:28 AM. Your daylight saving time setting is off. Have you
adjusted for the new DST by downloading all MS patches for the operating
system?

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Thanks, but what am I looking for? I see nothing but "Information" type
entries during the hours I was copying files.


No, you're posting in the past. It is currently 10:28am where I am,
eastern.

You need to look for error messages that relate to today's date.

You are entitled to maintain your own time standard. However,
if you look at this thread then you will find that all respondents'
replies follow each other sequentially. Yours, on the other hand,
are always one hour ahead of time. So either everyone else's
time is wrong or maybe yours is . . .

 

[Robert Moir]

Hi,

I've got relatively current gear (Seagate & WD drives, and a Plextor DVDR
drive) but I'm finding the 90 minutes it takes to dump the content of a
DVD onto my HD unnecessarily excessive. Is it supposed to take that long
to copy 3-4 gigs worth of raw data to a HD? The target drive isn't even
the one Windows is installed on, which is supposed to help speed-wise.

What could be causing this, and how could I tweak WinXP (fully patched)
into speeding this up? I've got 4GB of ram (even though 2 are being wasted
most of the time).

Let's just clear something up. Are you saying you're having trouble copying
_data_, in other word dragging and dropping files, or are you importing DVD
film into something? Because the time would be about right for the latter.
For the former, I'd agree with Pegasus.

And there is also something wrong with your time setting. I'm sitting here
reading this in the UK, it's currently 3.58 PM and your most recent post on
this thread is showing as being made at 4.28PM.

 

[mjs]

Copying files to the Windows system disk makes no difference when
it comes to speed. Your first step in your trouble-shooting effort should
be to check the Event Viewer. You might find some interesting stuff in
there. Click Start / Run / eventvwr.exe to launch it. If you turn a blank
there, try copying a different DVD.

How do I get there and what am I looking for?

PS: This is the 6th consecutive DVD, all of them have been slow.

 

[mjs]

I already gave you the recipe: Click Start / Run / eventvwr.exe to launch
it.

Thanks, but what am I looking for? I see nothing but "Information" type
entries during the hours I was copying files.

By the way, you're posting in the future. Fix your clock or
your time zone.

No, you're posting in the past. It is currently 10:28am where I am,
eastern.

 

[Robert Moir]

I'm grabbing a bunch of data files from a DVD I burned myself for backup
purposes, and copying them back onto my HD. They're mostly wav files. I'm
just copying them.

Ok. Just making sure. From there, here is where I would go next:

Does the event log show something? It'll typically either record errors in
reading from the disk or in writing to the hard drive - show lots of
attempts to retry something or talk about IO errors and whatnot. I know we
all keep coming back to that but it's the place where the computer keeps a
record of any problems it manages to notice by itself.

In device manager, expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, find the IDE channel
(making an assumption there I know) that your DVD drive is plugged into and
verify that it has a transfer mode of "DMA if available" and that it shows
some kind of DMA mode (rather than PIO) under Current Transfer Mode.

Check your antivirus isn't configured to scan WAV files.

Consider replacing the cables connecting the drive to the motherboard.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

One warning (which is unrelated to the slowness because it dates back to
20 mins ago) says : "TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the
number of concurrent TCP connect attempts." What does that mean and how
worried should I be?

As for the slowness in throughput between the DVD and HD, I see nothing
since 2:15am (which is probably really 1:15am). There are a few DCOM
errors here that look like this : "DCOM got error "The service cannot be
started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled
devices associated with it. " attempting to start the service usnjsvc with
arguments"

This seems to coincide with audio editing software crashing. This happens
every once in a while. Not sure how it would be related to my throughput
problems, but I'm no expert.

Any other ideas?

Let's put some figures against your claim. Get out your stopwatch
and do this:
- Identify a folder on your CD that stores between 50 and 500 MBytes
of data, either with or without subdirectories. Let's assume that the
folder name is F:\My Music.
- Get a stopwatch ready.
- Click Start / Run / cmd {Enter}
- Type this command:
xcopy "F:\My Music" "c:\Test\" (if ignoring subdirectories), or
xcopy /s "F:\My Music" "c:\Test\" (if including subdirectories)
- Record the time it takes to complete the copy process.
- Record the amount of data copied.
- Report these results in your reply.
- Report any error message you see.

For your information: My aging laptop uses an x24 CD/DVD ROM.
It took 51 seconds to copy 93 MBytes from a CD to my hard disk.

About your clock issue: Now that you agree that your clock was
out, you need to set it correctly. Your most recent replies were
posted some 12 hours into the future.

 

[Paul]

I'm grabbing a bunch of data files from a DVD I burned myself for backup
purposes, and copying them back onto my HD. They're mostly wav files. I'm
just copying them.

There are a couple things to check, and it made for an interesting
experiment here (fixed mine ).

Optical drives now, could be connected via IDE or SATA. I happen to
have a CDROM on this machine, and it is IDE (ribbon cable).

I checked Device Manager, and while my primary interface was
"DMA if available", my secondary interface (the ribbon cable with
just the CDROM on it), was in "PIO" mode.

I fired up a copy of Sisoftware Sandra Lite, and used the CD/DVD benchmark.
It does a linear read of the data on the disc. It seems to want real
data on the disc, so I used my copy of Knoppix (700MB stored on CD) as a
test disc. When I ran the Sisoftware benchmark, it was sloped at the
beginning of the CD, but flattened out at about 3.6MB/sec or so for
the second half of the disc.

That is consistent with PIO mode transfer (polled mode). So in fact,
the interface mode selected for the CD drive, was holding it back.

I set the Device Manager properties to "DMA if available" for the
secondary interface, and rebooted the computer. (This is Win2K I'm using,
so YMMV.)

After reboot, I reran the benchmark. This was more like it. The graph
had a steadily rising transfer rate, across the disc. Just like the other
graphs included as sample results, included with Sandra. Since the
graph was tilted, and didn't have any flat sections, I could conclude
from that, my test was "media" limited and not "cable" limited.

2.45MB/sec 16.4X beginning of 700MB CD
5.85MB/sec 39.0X end of 700MB CD
seek 106msec full stroke estimated

(1X = 150KB/sec for CD, a different conversion factor is used for DVD)

Transfer performance on a device is affected by two things. Transfer
bandwidth (which may be a function of which track the device is
accessing). And seek time. Seek time is an issue, if you're randomly
accessing files.

For example, say a CD had 100000 small 2KB files on it. And you randomly
transferred them from the CD, to your hard drive. The transfer would be
dominated by seek time. In my case, I'd have to wait up to 106 msec for
the head of the optical drive, to get to the new track. The average
wait might be 34 msec. Since the files are small, in this example case,
it wouldn't matter whether DMA or PIO transfer mode was used, because
the transfer interval, compared to the seek time, is so small.

The best way to transfer data from a storage device, is sequentially. For
example, if I zipped the contents of my hard drive, and made one big zip
file on the CD/DVD, then during the copy operation, the transfer would be
a largely linear transfer, with not a lot of seek component to it. Thus I
could get a rate between 2.45MB/sec and 5.85MB/sec. But if fetching 2KB
files all over the disc, I'd be lucky to see 20KB/sec as a transfer rate,
due to the seek operations for each 2KB file.

By looking at the linear transfer curve, you can tell whether transfer
is media or cable limited. And whether things are working decent or not.

You can get the Lite (free) version here. This version is one version later
than my copy.

http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/index.html?dir=dload&location=sware_dl_3264&langx=en&a=

HTH,
Paul

 

[mjs]

Ok. Just making sure. From there, here is where I would go next:

Does the event log show something? It'll typically either record errors in
reading from the disk or in writing to the hard drive - show lots of
attempts to retry something or talk about IO errors and whatnot. I know we
all keep coming back to that but it's the place where the computer keeps a
record of any problems it manages to notice by itself.

No errors during the copying/pasting process. But I do have a string DCOM
errors happening daily (that Pegasus completely ignored) that maybe you can
clear up for me. ;-)

DCOM got error "The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled
or because it has no enabled devices associated with it. " attempting to
start the service usnjsvc with arguments "

I have strings of about 1-5 instances of these in my event log, once or
twice a day.

I also have this recurring warning :
TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent
TCP connect attempts.

Any idea what I can "fix" to wipe these msgs out in the future, even if they
may have nothing to do with the original problem?

In device manager, expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, find the IDE channel
(making an assumption there I know) that your DVD drive is plugged into
and verify that it has a transfer mode of "DMA if available" and that it
shows some kind of DMA mode (rather than PIO) under Current Transfer Mode.

Three instances of Primary IDE Channel :

Primary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 4

Primary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 6

Primary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 6

Three instances of Secondary IDE Channel :

Secondary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Not Applicable

Secondary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Not Applicable

Secondary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 6

Check your antivirus isn't configured to scan WAV files.

Good idea. Just checked. It's not.

Consider replacing the cables connecting the drive to the motherboard.

Ack. :-(

 

[Robert Moir]

news:[email protected]...

No errors during the copying/pasting process. But I do have a string DCOM
errors happening daily (that Pegasus completely ignored) that maybe you
can clear up for me. ;-)

DCOM got error "The service cannot be started, either because it is
disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it. "
attempting to start the service usnjsvc with arguments "

I have strings of about 1-5 instances of these in my event log, once or
twice a day.

DCOM errors are how you know you've got Windows installed. This is connected
to one of the brand new huggy feely rubbish services that get installed with
MSN messenger these days, probably sharing folders or remote rootkit
installation or whatever it's called these days. If you don't use that
service, disable it and see how you go. If you use it, stop using it and see
previous sentence.

I also have this recurring warning :
TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent
TCP connect attempts.

Any idea what I can "fix" to wipe these msgs out in the future, even if
they may have nothing to do with the original problem?

That is interesting. You've got something doing a heavy lot of network
traffic at this point, and not the normal kind either. You're either using
some kind of network tool, some kind of peer to peer service (that includes
a lot of those nice new 'online TV channel' things btw) or someone else has
installed some kind of odd network tool on your system, possibly some kind
of peer to peer thing, and is using it.

Three instances of Primary IDE Channel :

Primary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 4

Primary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 6

Primary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 6

Three instances of Secondary IDE Channel :

Secondary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Not Applicable

Secondary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Not Applicable

Secondary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 6

Well that looks good - and should provoke lots of error messages if things
aren't right.

At the very least, ensure it's all plugged properly. I could be wrong, I'm
just going through the steps I'd take at this point. I'd suggest updating
drivers for the motherboard and drive controllers too, but I'm sure you've
tried that.

Actually, as you talk about it being a DVD drive, _can_ you watch a film
from this disk? If it's being that slow due to some kind of hardware fault
I'd suspect a lil bit of stuttering with this one if it's the DVD drive. You
should check the hard drives too - how does hard disk to hard disk copying
behave? Is that how you expect?

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

No errors during the copying/pasting process. But I do have a string DCOM

errors happening daily (that Pegasus completely ignored) that maybe you
can clear up for me. ;-)

Nope, I did not ignore them but I prefer to gather some
data before exploring an issue that seems to be an
unlikely candidate for your problem. You can read about
it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841996

 

[mjs]

DCOM errors are how you know you've got Windows installed. This is
connected to one of the brand new huggy feely rubbish services that get
installed with MSN messenger these days, probably sharing folders or
remote rootkit installation or whatever it's called these days. If you
don't use that service, disable it and see how you go. If you use it, stop
using it and see previous sentence.

WHAT service? I use normal file transfering through Messenger, but none of
that "shared folders" stuff. Just the one-on-one stuff. Which service should
I be disabling?

That is interesting. You've got something doing a heavy lot of network
traffic at this point, and not the normal kind either. You're either using
some kind of network tool, some kind of peer to peer service (that
includes a lot of those nice new 'online TV channel' things btw) or
someone else has installed some kind of odd network tool on your system,
possibly some kind of peer to peer thing, and is using it.

Now you're scaring me. :-/ I have Azureus installed, but use it maybe twice
a year. It's not loaded 99% of the time. If something else is trying to
communicate, I'd really like to find out what and stop it.

 

[sdlomi2]

snip <

MJS, my earlier post was satisfied with the info. you fed back to me--no
need to 'dumb down'. BTW: Jeopardy's Alec Trebek(sp?)seems to be quite an
intelligent Canadian, so DON'T knock 'em!

Also, at this point, I think we all need to go back and look at your
basic setup. Perhaps this will reveal a NONO as far as how
device-connections should/should not be arranged. (We've probably all had
one or more NONO's in our past.) You said in a sub-post the following:

"Three instances of Primary IDE Channel :

Primary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 4

Primary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 6

Primary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 6

Three instances of Secondary IDE Channel :

Secondary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Not Applicable

Secondary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Not Applicable

Secondary IDE Channel : DMA if available
Current Transfer Mode : Ultra DMA Mode 6"

How about telling us (1)what each of the above has connected and what is
connected to what. Also, (2)are you using 80-conductor ribbon cables or
40-conductor? FYI: 80-conductor has noticeably smaller-appearing wires in
the ribbon cable than the larger-appearing wires in the 40-conductor. (3)
How do you have access to three ide-connectors--are you using a pci-ide
adapter for the 3rd ide connector? (4) If so, what type/brand/version
controller card(pci-adapter)are you using? (5) Give us the drive-letters to
each primary channel AND what device is attached to it as secondary. (6)
Tell us what is on each hd. (7) What model Plextor drive are you using?
This will give us its speed-ratings At one time, they were tops in
cd-burners; but so far as dvd burners, .......?
Ensure we know which ide-primary your dvd is attached to (c-drive etc.).
[[This assumes the dvd IS attached to a primary hd as a secondary device,
vs. to a primary ide socket as a primary device.]] Also let us know which
hd has the dvd-burning software you are using. Also, what dvd-burning
software ARE you using--both name and version.
I really am suspicious at this point. AND I am really expecting some of
us will find the culprit with knowing this information. Hey! We are still
trying--and I'm sure your patience is being challenged by now. But, believe
this: we all go through some degree of these problems, and solving them is
where we all receive our pay in the form of self-satisfaction. Often better
as well as cheaper than SOME repair shops.

Should you wish to gain some above info w/out opening box and
disconnecting to read w/flashlite and magnifying glass, download BELARC(It
may provide some.) free from 'net and run a scan to list your installed
hardware and software--may give some useful info. Here's the website:

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html <.

sdlomi2

 

[mjs]

OK, I think it's fixed now. "Automatically adjust for daylight savings etc."
was unchecked. This is because WinXP got the week wrong this year with
regards to setting the clock back one hour (convention recently changed). So
I had it set up manually.

Everything should be OK now.