Bizarre SATA DVD drive issue

October 9th, 2020

My SATA DVD drive appears to be interrupting my SATA HDD. Whenever the drive spins up, is having trouble reading, or has to read many files in a short space of time, almost everything else on the system just freezes. Music that’s playing from the HDD stops, for example. The HDD light doesn’t come on, just everything stops until I cancel whatever the DVD drive is doing.
Any ideas?

Answer #1
Power supply choking?
Answer #2
Sounds like you got a bad drive, or just bad connections. I remember one of my drives doing this before as well, but it wasn’t SATA, so I just went and bought a brand new drive and it solved the problem.
Only other problem I can think of is you have an IRQ problem.
Answer #3

TheDA wrote: Select all

Power supply choking?
Hmm in hindsight I should mention that it doesn’t happen with my (same brand) IDE drive, which I’m assuming uses a similar power consumption. But it’s something I could investigate, sure.
Any other thoughts?
Answer #4
Hmm in hindsight I should mention that it doesn't happen with my (same brand) IDE drive, which I'm assuming uses a similar power consumption. But it's something I could investigate, sure.Disconnect the power from the IDE one and see if it still does it.
What motherboard you got?
Answer #5
check if there’s a firmware update for your DVD drive
you in AHCI mode or IDE mode
vista or XP ?
you try swapping the SATA sockets on the mobo ?
is having trouble reading, or has to read many files in a short space of time,
duz this for every disk ?
or just one’s with many files ?
Answer #6
My DVD drive use to do this its a sign its going to break, next it didn’t recognise DVD-Roms then DVDs
I contacted manufacturer and because I bought some insurance thing with my PC they replaced it.
If you can try someone elses drive in your computer/ your drive in theirs.
Answer #7
Updated firmware on this, didn’t help. Changed mobo connector, and it almost completely solved it. Now it only seems to slow down other access during high-bandwidth reads.
Could be PSU choking as mentioned earlier, or maybe a dodgy cable that I’ve not had chance to swap out yet. I’ll try that soon.
Specs are IDE mode on an ASUS M3A78 PRO, with XP Pro x64.
Answer #8
I had a similar bit opposite problems on my gogabyte p35dq6 MB – with the sata dvd on the same or nearby port to the hd, the dvd went from 16x to 1x read/write (by ‘nearby’ I mean if hd is port 1, then dvd was on port 2).
Although sata down’t have master/slave, the ports seem to be linked.
I stopped all problems by putting hd 1 on port 1, hd 2 on port 3, dvd 1 on port 5 and dvd 2 on port 7 = all running at full speed.
It might also be a function of the controller you have on the MB – if you ahve more than one type (mine has two different controller brands on it – ports above 5 are JMicron, I think, below are intel (??)), try a different one.