EDITOR'S NOTE: Edited and reprinted with permission by Martin Krohn.
Introduction
Many of you have 40+ speed cd drives or 10+ speed DVD drives and dont even think about tweaking them out because you figure that is fast enough. Well guess what. It COULD be faster. Were going to show you exactly what you have to do. Well start you out with the basics.
Just like with the BIOS on your motherboard often times the manufacturer will find problems with the product after it has already begun shipping. They will apply the fixed BIOS to future shipping models and also post the updated BIOS to the web for us to download. You will need to know the model number of your drive before you can do this. Just like with BIOS updates, if it's not broke don't fix it! For firmware updates you will have to visit the manufacturers website and lookup your drives model number in their support sections.
IDE Channel Configuration
It is best to have your optical media drive on a different channel than your hard drive. If you can make the drive the master of that IDE channel, that is even better. It is very important to keep slower devices away from your fast ATA 100 hard drive.
Drivers
No matter what you are tweaking something as simple as a driver update can supply
the greatest performance boost. You can also get bug fixes, and new features
out of a driver update so you really should start with this. I usually cruise
over to driver HQ to find the latest drivers. http://www.drivershq.com/main_home.html.
Device Manager Settings
For Win9x
Theres a couple of quick tweaks that can be done right in the device manager. Right click on My Computer, choose Properties, choose Device Manager. Next go to the CD-ROM listing and select which drive you want to tweak and hit the properties button. Go to the settings tab and make sure that Sync Data Transfer and DMA both have checkmarks by them.
The Auto insert notification box doesnt really have anything to do with performance but you can stop that autoplay on some of your cds from running. Leaving it ticked will allow the autoplay of audio CDs and different installers that run on certain disks. Unchecking it will disable this. It can be a hassle at times but it also has its uses.
After you click ok you will have to restart before the changes will take effect.
Now you might be wonder what did I just do?
Direct Memory Access (DMA) The default
mode for a CD ROM drive is PIO mode which you will see a pretty nasty hit to
your CPU usage while using your CD drive. That is why it is highly recommended
that you use DMA mode. Your games that recquire a lot of CD accesses will run
quite a bit smoother with this enabled. Also sometimes when transfering large
amounts of data from a CD to your hard drive you will actually be able to do
other things while the information is being copied. Having DMA mode enabled
allows your drive to directly access memory without pulling a lot of your CPU
power.
To enable DMA mode in WinXP you will have to go to the IDE/ATAPI controller
settings for the channel that your CD drive is on and set it for DMA if available.
WinBoost 2001 - Win9x/ME only
Theres lots of different tweaking programs out there that will allow
some different CD ROM tweaks. I personally use WinBoost 2001 for tweaking Winx/ME (direct download link here)
Now that youve downloaded and installed winboost. Now look along the
top and find the system and booting button. See where it says maximize CD/DVD-ROM
speed? The default for a CD-ROM drive is 8x. Youll want to set it for
whatever speed drive you have. If you have a drive faster than 48x then just
set it as 48x. Also turn the size of cache from default to large.
If you have a DVD drive then select what speed DVD drive you have. If you have
faster than 6x then just select 6x.
TweakXP - Win XP only
First of all you should download this program if you're running windows XP
because it'll do a LOT more than just tweak your CD drive.
http://www.totalidea.de/frameset-tweakxp.htm
What you are looking for is in the hardware tweaks button. You will see a small
button that says CD/DVD tweaks. Click on that.
A box that looks like the image to the right will pop up and there's a few things for you to select. Selecting the large cache size will help in things like games but not during file transfers. I prefer to have the autorun function turned off. If I'm inserting a CD I know exactly what I want off it it :) Anytime the autorun tries to play it slows the system down too much.
Also disabling the CD burning features will stop that service from running which frees up system resources mainly RAM. I don't like XPs built in CD burning software and prefer to use something else like Nero.
Conclusion
There really isnt many tweaks that you need to do to get your CD drive
running at it's best. Yet so many people overlook it.
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