Slow Music CD & Film DVD read speed

Hello, I have the late 2008 mbp with a matshita superdrive.
I am finding read speeds for music and film discs to be very slow. Activity window shows it to be 2mb/s peaking at 4mb/s. Data discs read at 8mb/s. The drive is audibly spinning faster with data discs.
So importing music to itunes or converting dvds for my ipod touch is painfully slow. Cpu usage is nowhere near maximum and i have even copied the discs to test conversion speed from the harddrive.
My best guess is that apple has reduced the drive speed when playing these discs so the superdrives themselves are not so loud as to ruin the listening/watching experience.
Has anyone else experienced this? If I am correct is there a way to change the drive speeds for different media.
Thanks in advance.

I too am experiencing the same problem. I am currently in Iraq, and my wife sends me videos of my daughters that she burned to DVD. The videos are not too large, but they take FOREVER to transfer to my laptop. The drive spins up as you mentioned, then slows down and never speeds up again. It doesn't matter if the media is DVD or CD, the transfer speed is always slow. I hope that a solution presents itself soon. Obviously I do not have a local Apple store that I can take my machine into, and I am loathe to be without a computer for 6-8 weeks to send it back and forth.

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Read speeds for my super drive ?

can anyone tell me what the read speeds are for the super drive i have in my MBP (MacBookPro3,1) C2D 2.4GHz ? specifically DVD read speeds
MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-857E:
Firmware Revision: ZA0E
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO
Media:
Type: DVD-ROM
Blank: No
Erasable: No
Overwritable: No
Appendable: No

Apple reports that the 8X dual-layer DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW SuperDrive has a maximum write speed of "8x DVD-R, DVD+R; 4x DVD-R DL (double layer), DVD+R DL (double layer), DVD-RW, DVD+RW; 24x CD-R; 10x CD-RW" and *read speed* of "8x DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-ROM; 6x DVD-ROM (double layer DVD-9), DVD-R DL (double layer), DVD+R DL (double layer), DVD-RW, DVD+RW; 24x CD."

Slow CD/DVD Reading

When I insert a CD to rip music into iTunes, I can hear the CD spin up, but then immediately slow down again. I click the Import CD button, but then it only imports at around 3x-4x. When I first got the machine, it would import at 10x-12x and I could hear the CD spinning much faster. Has anyone else had this problem? I don't do much burning, but I have been able to successfully burn CDs at around 8x and DVDs at 2x.
Also, if the CD is just reading data, as when I look at a CD full of pictures, it is again very slow and never really spins up to full speed, so I don't think the speed problems are related to iTunes. Any suggestions?

Apple Discussions!
See if repairing permissions & restarting helps any.
Another help source (if you haven't already done so).
Go to your OS Help Menu. In the search field type dvd or cd
Click on all the troubleshooting topics & Support Articles that pertain to your issue.
You can also do the same in Disk Utility. Open same up.
At the bottom left of the window, click on the purple button w/the "?" in the middle.
This will bring up the Help Menu.
===============
Try a different brand.
Make sure the DVD/CDs are not dirty, smudged and/or scratched.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50448 How to Handle and Clean CD and DVD Discs
Your drive may need cleaning. Cleaning kits can be purchased from any store that sells CD/DVDs.

[SOLVED] Slow read speeds from a DroboFS mounted in fstab via cifs

I've decided to move all my media over to my drobofs which I have and I've mounted the share on the drobo in fstab this way:
//mydrobofs/Media /media/drobofs cifs iocharset=utf8,uid=af,gid=users,guest,dir_mode=0775 0 0
The share is mounted fine at boot but my issue is now the read speeds are very slow. opening a video file with vlc takes 30 seconds or more before it starts playing. Before this was accessing the share on my drobofs via the network tab (samba shares) in Dolphin (using KDE4) and here the video files played immediately in vlc (no delay). The reason why I want to mount the share via cifs and fstab is to move music collection over to the my drobofs and since I'm using Amarok for managing my collection this is the only way to make Amarok see my Music collection on the Drobofs.
Why am I getting so slow read speeds with cifs?
Last edited by fettouhi (2012-05-07 05:54:00)

I did some more testing and seems like the problem has something to do with how many video files there are in the directory. I have some directories with several 100 video files and here I get this long delay but if I play a file that is in a directory by itself or only a few other video files are there, then the video starts immediately (almost). Is there a way to turn off this behaviour in vlc? Is it generating a playlist or what?

Slow DVD burn speed.

I'm having an issue, burning DVDs with K3b or most other software is slow. My LG DVD drive is capable of 16X speeds, I would have no problem burning at this speed under Windows XP. Under Arch I'm only burning at around 4X, you can imagine that it's quite slow. For comparison say a 4.3GB DVD takes me 3 times as long to burn, roughly 13-15min. I haven't tried burning CDs because I haven't bought them for a few years.
If this is of any help:
hdparm -I /dev/dvd | grep -i dma
DMA: sdma0 sdma1 sdma2 mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4
Thanks for any help, I really need to resolve this because I burn DVDs quite often.
Last edited by PrimoTurbo (2008-07-22 11:53:29)

Same brand. Also I've tried at least 3 good quality brands with the same results.
Last edited by PrimoTurbo (2008-07-22 23:03:13)

Gt70: after installing windows 8.1 read speed is slow :(

Hi guys,
I got my MSI GT70 with the 128*3 SSD + 1024 HDD configuration. It can only get a read speed around 740 MB/s in hdtune. but before i install windows 8.1 (i install it from scratch reformating the whole system) the read speed was around 1100 mb/s ! I searched in another forum and found some one said "MSI representative told us our test unit was actually underperforming on the SSD front.".
So does anyone know how to config the raid correctly to get back the 1100 MB/s speed?
Many many thanks!!!

Quote from: loki5100 on 19-December-13, 01:58:06
Many thanks !
yes it's show that dragon edition is a little more faster than the i7 4700mq
me only 1250 MB/s average rate ...
wait that you computer is running several hours and try again the test ... it's here that i saw the speed go down to 750 mb/s :(
I don't have the extreme, so I have the same cpu as you. The difference could be mainboard optimizations but mostly sure the hard disks. Mines are plextor.
But anyway 1250MB/s is not slow at all. Maybe slower as expected, but not slow for sure

HP ENVY 15: Slow 4K read speed for Dual SSD's in RAID 0 - Needs to be addressed!

Crystalmark scores 2nd gen Envy 15:
Read/Write
SEQ 352 / 215
512K 270 / 195
4K 14.2 / 110
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=427278&page=754
read write
418.2 / 213.9 seq
251.3 / 181.1 random 512k
9.8 / 53.17 random 4k
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=427278&page=750
4k Read Speed MUCH SLOWER than without Raid 0 (~20-25 mb/s)

Not exactly sure, I pulled those benchmarks off of notebookreview. All I know from reading the forum is that HP Envy 15's in RAID 0 seem to be severely underperforming 4k read speeds relative to the same SSD's not in RAID 0. The 4k random read is the MOST IMPORTANT benchmark for real world performance.
Other posts in the old HP forum have cited that disabled C1E could possibly fix the 4k read issue, however the Envy 15 seems to have no way to access this option in the BIOS.

Why is the cd read speed so slow?

Brand new iMac 27" 2.7GHz 16GB Ram running 10.7.3. CD read speeds are very slow...something like 5x. Importing audio CDs to iTunes is extremely slow. Error checking is turned OFF. Any ideas?

Slimline SuperDrives are always much slower than tray loading drives.

G5 Dual - DVD Reader has gone very very slow after Leopard

After 1 Migrate install and 1 clean install, I notice that reinstalling apps is taking 4/5 times as long as they should it's as if my DVD Reader has gone very very slow. I thought at first it was the migration that had caused FCPS2 to reinstall slow.
(Sony DVD RW AW-G170A 4 months old) on G5 Dual 2's)
FCPS2 wanted 19-hrs to install, I waited 6 hrs and then gave up. Luckily or unluckily as the case may be I used the time install Leo on my other Macs.
In the end I have installed Apps over the Firewire network connected to my other G5 Dual with the stock DVD drive, they are installing fast now.

Some more info about my setup:
*Simultaneous Dual band AEBS:*
Radio Mode: 802.11n only (5 GHz) - 802.11b/g
Radio Channel Selection: Manual - 161 (5GHz), 6(2.4GHz)
*Airport Express:*
Wireless mode: Extend a wireless network
Allow wireless clients checked under the name of the network (same as for AEBS).
Both are WPA/WPA2 Personal security. And both the routers were upgraded to 7.4.2 firmware this morning with the hope that it will help.
*N Devices (both working fine):*
Apple TV 40GB
2009 Model Mac Mini upgraded to Snow Leopard - working perfectly.
*G Devices:*
Thinkpad running WinXP
Dell Laptop running WinXP
Acer Netbook running WinXP
iPod Touch
iPhone 3G
Linksys webcam
_All of the above are working fine_.
+2008 model Mac mini -+ upgrade to Snow Leopard shows extremely slow wifi connection that it is unusable. It takes 20min to load apple homepage. When I boot from the clone of my Leopard lying on my external drive, it works perfectly.
I compared the settings between all the tabs of Network-->Airport-->Advanced and they are identical between Snow Leopard and Leopard mode except that SL doesn't have the "Apple Talk" tab.
Appreciate any help to debug this.

Slow reading speed on Time Capsule disk

I get terribly slow TC disk speed when measured with Black Magic tool using Wifi and even slower on Ethernet.
I get low speeds on Wifi but even lower speeds on Ethernet connection. See attached pics below.
Wifi:
My TC is on Wifi using N network and 5ghz and it seems the speed I get over the Wifi is reasonable. Based on Pondini blog, here are approximate speeds for USB, ethernet and Wifi:
http://pondini.org/TM/29.html
Pondini's figures don't seem to take into consideration a 5Ghz Wifi connection, which should be about 2x faster than 2.4ghz (144Mbps vs 300Mbps). So I am assuming the transfer would be around 20-40 GB per hour which was roughly what I experienced when doing testing using file transfers (and slightly below USB 2.0). TC will not operate on this maximum speed as there are other factors, such as overhead, internet connection and TC hardware itself.
It seems to be reasonable, it takes me about 4-6 hours to backup 100GB Time Machine backup. Is this amount of time normal? I assume yes.
Ethernet:
Recently I needed to restore a file from TimeMachine. I started to browse but the browsing using the TimeMachine app was horribly slow. So I thought using Ethernet cable instead of Wifi would make things better. No way. So I tested the speed of the hard drive using the Black Magic tool and below is what I get - the speed of Reading on Ethernet is much slower than Wifi.
If I interpret the numbers correctly, the Black Magic tool shows MB/s, in which case 11-15MB/s should be about 80-120 mbps, which is roughly the G speed on Wifi and roughly about 50% of the maximum speed of N network?
Are these calculations correct?
If these numbers are correct, the results are acceptable, as I would not expect the Time Capsule Hard Disk to reach the maximum speeds provided through the Ethernet or Wifi connection.
However, what concerns me is why is the reading speed through Ethernet so slow. It's only 3.5 MB/s.
Activity monitor is not much help, it's hard to figure out where is the issue.
My Setup:
MacBook 2012, Mavericks 10.9.4, Time Capsule 2012, Ethernet, Wifi N 5Ghz. No other machines or appliances active. Internet and network seems to operate fine, no issues.
This is ETHERNET:
THIS IS WIFI:

OSX:
Yes there are many issues with Mavericks, it almost feels like OSX 11.0 and not 10.9.5 from the bugginess. I can't speak for how the system is changing from inside but most of it doesn't affect me, so it's mostly the annoying things that pop up and the good things that just go away because Apple keep "dummy-fying" the OS.
I was considering downgrade to Snow Leopard couple of months back but it would not support the hardware. It wasn't so much editing the supported hardware list to installation but the drivers are missing for newer hardware in SL. I used to mess around with Windows but I am not ready to mess OSX yet. I still keep Snow Leopard on one of my machines and I always like to go back to it as it feels consistent and light.
Speed:
You found the reason.
1. Yes I turned off wireless and ethernet when testing one or the other.
2. Ethernet is 100baseTX and grayed out.. because..
3. I should have realized it's because I use USB ethernet Apple adapter. But given the USB has 480Mbs speed, after taking into account some overhead, the speed should still be higher than Wifi. Or maybe not.. I made assumption it should be fast enough so I didn't even consider that could be bottleneck on it's own.
TC:
If your TC is 2012 then it is Gen4.. .... recommend you downgrade the firmware to 7.6.1.....
Yes, I upgraded to latest firmware. Yes, it's TC Gen 4. By mistake, I didn't know there are issues. But soon I realized for instance Apple has removed the setting in Airport to force "N" radio for network only. To simplify things, you get now combined N, B, G whether you like it or now. Now things may interfere with your other networks and if you happen to use non-apple clients connecting to AirPort, you end up with hodge-podge N and B/G connectivity that slows down the network even more.
If Apple releases the BASH update, it probably needs to be upgraded anyways? I assume their software on Airport is also Unix / Linux flavour?

Riplock causing painfully slow DVD Read on 2.93 GHz iMac i7

I have a 2 month old iMac i7 2.93 GHz with a HL-DT-ST DVDRW GA32N (I believe this is the Hitachi) Drive. Ripping my legal DVD's takes FOREVER. To Clarify, it's actually the scanning that takes all the time - 30 to 40 minutes in many cases. My 4 year old MacBook Pro is much faster. I've done a little research online and it appears everyone with this drive is experiencing the same problem and apparently is a Riplock issue - wherein the drive slows down to 2x or 4x speed to prevent disc noise while watching a movie. The problem is, it stalls DVD ripping and sometimes software installation to the point that it almost becomes unusable. Anyone else on here experiencing this same problem? I believe Apple needs to either replace these drives or provide a firmware upgrade that addresses the problem.

I was having a problem ripping store bought CD's to ITunes and opened a case with Apple for suspected hardware issue. Turns out the problem was Norton AntiVirus by Symantec which was blocking my external drives. Even though the CD is internal it was killing it. Once I shut off Norton everthing started working.
The way I came to figure out it was a Software and not hardware issue was that the Superdrive worked perfectly under Windows 7 inside of VMWare Fusiion.
If you have any sort of AntiVirus, try shutting and down and using the Superdrive.
My machine is the same , late 2011 with with Superdrive GA32N Firmware KE06

Music CDS no longer read and DVDs work fine?

MAC NOW JUST EJECTS ALL MUSIC CD'S. DVD WILL PLAY BUT MUSIC WILL NOT. I'VE BEEN RIPPIN' MP3'S OFF OF THE DISK ON2 MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE. THEN NEXT THING I KNOW... IT STARTED SPITTIN' THEM BACK OUT. SOMETIMES IT WOULD DO IT 2 JUST 1 OR 2 AND I FIGURED THE DISK WAS MESSED UP OR SOMETHING. Please help

This is a hardware issue. Likely your optical drive has failed. Contact Apple using www.apple.com/support/contact if you are in a country that supports it or call the appropriate phone number on this page. Alternatively carry the MacBook in to an Apple retail store or service provider to ask for an estimate.

How do you change the dvd write speed in pre 11

can i change the dvd write speed i pre 11 and if so how thanks

Not in Premiere Elements.
You'll need to use Premiere Elements to burn the DVD files to a folder, and then use a program like the excellent, free ImgBurn to burn the VIDEO_TS folder to a disc at a slower speed.

Mac book pro is running very slow what can i do to speed it up?

mac book pro is running very slow what can i do to speed it up?

Things You Can Do To Resolve Slow Downs
If your computer seems to be running slower here are some things you can do:
Start with visits to:     OS X Maintenance - MacAttorney;
                                  The X Lab: The X-FAQs;
                                  The Safe Mac » Mac Performance Guide;
                                  The Safe Mac » The myth of the dirty Mac;
                                  Mac maintenance Quick Assist.
Boot into Safe Mode then repair your hard drive and permissions:
Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions Pre-Lion
Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
Repair the Hard Drive - Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the Utilites Menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD disk icon and click on the arrow button below.
When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu. Select Restart from the Apple menu.
Restart your computer normally and see if this has helped any. Next do some maintenance:
For situations Disk Utility cannot handle the best third-party utility is Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible.
Note: Alsoft ships DW on a bootable DVD that will startup Macs running Snow Leopard or earlier. It cannot start Macs that came with Lion or later pre-installed, however, DW will work on those models.
Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts was significantly reduced since Tiger. These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard or later and should not be installed.
OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive.
Helpful Links Regarding Malware Protection
An excellent link to read is Tom Reed's Mac Malware Guide.
Also, visit The XLab FAQs and read Detecting and avoiding malware and spyware.
See these Apple articles:
          Mac OS X Snow Leopard and malware detection
          OS X Lion- Protect your Mac from malware
          OS X Mountain Lion- Protect your Mac from malware
          About file quarantine in OS X
If you require anti-virus protection I recommend using VirusBarrier Express 1.1.6 or Dr.Web Light both from the App Store. They're both free, and since they're from the App Store, they won't destabilize the system. (Thank you to Thomas Reed for these recommendations.)
Troubleshooting Applications
I recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX, Mavericks Cache Cleaner, or Cocktail that you can use for removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc. Corrupted cache, log, or temporary files can cause application or OS X crashes as well as kernel panics.
If you have Snow Leopard or Leopard, then for similar repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the command line. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard. Applejack does not work with Lion and later.
Basic Backup
For some people Time Machine will be more than adequate. Time Machine is part of OS X. There are two components:
1. A Time Machine preferences panel as part of System Preferences;
2. A Time Machine application located in the Applications folder. It is
    used to manage backups and to restore backups. Time Machine
    requires a backup drive that is at least twice the capacity of the
    drive being backed up.
Alternatively, get an external drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Carbon Copy Cloner
2. Get Backup
3. Deja Vu
4. SuperDuper!
5. Synk Pro
6. Tri-Backup
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files. For help with using Time Machine visit Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for help with all things Time Machine.
Referenced software can be found at MacUpdate.
Additional Hints
Be sure you have an adequate amount of RAM installed for the number of applications you run concurrently. Be sure you leave a minimum of 10% of the hard drive's capacity as free space.
Add more RAM. If your computer has less than 2 GBs of RAM and you are using OS X Leopard or later, then you can do with more RAM. Snow Leopard and Lion work much better with 4 GBs of RAM than their system minimums. The more concurrent applications you tend to use the more RAM you should have.
Always maintain at least 15 GBs or 10% of your hard drive's capacity as free space, whichever is greater. OS X is frequently accessing your hard drive, so providing adequate free space will keep things from slowing down.
Check for applications that may be hogging the CPU:
Pre-Mavericks
Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder. Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order. If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time (>=70,) then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar. Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process. See if that helps. Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.
Mavericks and later
Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder. Select All Processes from the View menu. Click on the CPU tab in the toolbar. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order. If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time (>=70,) then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar. Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process. See if that helps. Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.
Often this problem occurs because of a corrupted cache or preferences file or an attempt to write to a corrupted log file.

Is there a way to burn DVDs at speeds lower than 4x?

Hi to everybody. I need to burn DVDs at speeds lower than 4x (preferably 1x) but both Burn and LiquidCD (together with Disk Utility) are unable to. I believe that this depends on the fact that alle these utilities rely on Apple's optical Burning Framework. Is there a way to get rid of this problem without needing to buy Toast or Disco (I very rarely burn CDs and an expense in this direction wouldn't be justifeied).
TIA.
Simon
Message was edited by: majortom67

Insert a blank disc (it's not going to write, so the disc won't be wasted) then look in the "Disc Burning" section of System Profiler (Utilities folder). It will show the supported burning speeds for that disc in that drive. With my Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-115D and a Verbatim DVD-R 16X disc, it shows:
Write Speeds: 4x, 6x, 8x, 12x, 16x, 20x
These speeds are determined by the drive and brand of disc, and cannot be changed by software. If you tried to run a drive at a slower speed, the drive's servo might not be able to keep the rotation smooth enough (so the dots are burned evenly spaced) without adding a heavy flywheel, and the laser would need to produce longer pulses at lower intensity. Laser diodes may quit when the power is reduced too much. For this drive, it must be the minimum power that laser will operate at, since the drive will burn DVD-RW discs at 1x or 2x. The RW must need more energy to burn each dot, so the laser power does not have to be reduced too much.
Why do you need to burn at slower speeds?
If you don't want to use DVD-RW, you may be able to find some older, lower speed DVD-Rs
<http://www.netsoftmedia.com/paypalshop/princo1x.html>
You would have try one to see if they are compatible with modern burners.

Slow Music CD & Film DVD read speed

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