Newsgroups: alt.cd-rom Path: cdrom.com!barrnet.net!biosci!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!relay.philips.nl!philica!adrie From: adrie@ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen) Subject: Re: Philips CDD 521 and reading speed Message-ID: <1994Apr15.070245.6872@ica.philips.nl> Keywords: Philips CDD 521, read speed Organization: Philips Consumer Electronics, Eindhoven, The Netherlands References: Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1994 07:02:45 GMT Lines: 18 In article CarlVern@psy.aau.dk (Carl Verner Skou) writes: >We have a Philips CDD 521, and we find the reading speed _extremely_ slow, >e.g. it took over two hours to install Visual C++ 1.5 from the CD, all read >operations are very slow. Is this normal? As far as I know: YES. When we got an early version of the 521, I wrote an MSCDEX to AH1542 device driver for it and discovered that the 521 is extremely slow in reading. It appears that for each SCSI read command, the 521 re-synchronizes its laser arm. This takes at least one revolution of the disc so you'd better read large chunks of data, otherwise the performance is very low. Of course, this is a 521 firmware problem and could be fixed. I don't know if the newer versions of the 521 are faster. Moral of the story: use the 521 to write CD-Rs, don't use the to read CDROMs! There are better (and cheaper) CDROM drives to read CDROMs. Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl) Philips Consumer Electronics, Eindhoven, the Netherlands