Doc said:
Currently running a Core2 Quad, I find that putting in a DVD, CD or
Blu-Ray disk and waiting for the machine to recognize it and have it
be ready to write to still takes about as long as it did on my first
Pentium I machine. Why is this process still so plodding?
There's more than one step to it.
1) The drive has its own processor (MediaTek for example).
2) The drive looks at the media tag on the media.
3) Once "recognized" in some way, an event is raised with
the OS. It could be, that the OS polls the storage bus
once a second, to detect that a new disc is "available".
4) Now, the OS portion cuts in. On a multi-type drive
(CD/DVD/BluRay), the type of disc, the file system on it,
will be playing a part.
5) The file system details, may require accessing a few different
spots on the optical drive. Since the access time of modern
drives is 110 to 150 milliseconds or so, that can be rather slow.
Older drives, like some CD drives, the number for them was only
90 milliseconds.
It's not an excuse as such. It's just there's a lot of
"slow media reading activity" before the disc is finally
available in the file explorer.
It's still possible, for there to be a software problem
with your setup, in which case, whether you have a quad
or not, might not make much difference. For example,
if you have some "virtual CD" software, that may be
interfering with the detection of real physical drives.
If you're a pack rat, and have installed every possible
kind of ripping software out there, that can be part of
your grief as well. I had such a virtual CD software
on an older system, and if I tried to run Nero, it
would almost drop the system to its knees, as Nero
would discover the virtual CD and keep poking it.
Once I disabled the virtual CD software, things
returned to more normal time constants.
Paul
