Why optical drives refuse to spin up?

[M76]

I'm sick and tired of optical drives operating at reduced speeds.When I'm installing an old school game that still uses a DVD, it takes a decade (fitting as I'm installing C&C: First Decade), and I hear that the optical drive just won't spin up to full speed.

Are there any workarounds to force it to spin up?

 

[GotNoRice]

What are you using to make the determination that your drive is not spinning up to full speed?

What brand of drive, and how old is it?

You can get a brand new SATA Dual Layer DVD Burner from a respected brand these days for about $25.

Also most of the time you can find C&C classic game collections on sale for like $5 on Origin, etc.

 

[SRTie4k]

You do realize that optical drives are limited to a certain speed at which they can read data, right? And depending on where the data that is being read physically exists on the disc (the inside vs the outside), the drive will increase/decrease RPM, because as we all know, the circumference of a disc is greater the further out you go from the axis (i.e. more data can be packed into a full revolution on the outside of the disc vs the inside of the disc).

 

[cyclone3d]

Installing stuff from optical media just plain sucks. The only thing worse is installing from floppy disks.

If you want it to install faster, just copy the contents to a hard drive or thumb drive.

If the old game has "copy protection" that requires the CD/DVD to be inserted when you play.. big woop. You can always go download a NO-CD patch for it.

There is pretty much almost no reason to even be using an optical drive anymore.

 

[safelyRemove]

Three things I know determine the spin up:
The access patterns of the file reads, which you can't change.
The difficulty or ease in reading the disk at higher speeds, which you usually can't change.
On older IDE systems, if the IDE is in PIO mode instead of DMA, it will often not spin up. On XP, you can usually see this on your IDE controller in device manager. Sometimes just changing it there works, other times, it won't change, or the BIOS is controlling it.

 

[M76]

You do realize that optical drives are limited to a certain speed at which they can read data, right? And depending on where the data that is being read physically exists on the disc (the inside vs the outside), the drive will increase/decrease RPM, because as we all know, the circumference of a disc is greater the further out you go from the axis (i.e. more data can be packed into a full revolution on the outside of the disc vs the inside of the disc).

CLV vs. CAV or P-CAV, I haven't seen a CLV drive in ages, and CAV drives spin at a constant RPM the data transfer rate will be higher towards the edge of the disc.

Basically all optical drives I saw in the last 10-12 years sucked bad. The last drive I owned that actually worked at advertised speeds was my Plextor P-CAV 20x SCSI CD-ROM. It usually read discs faster than 40x drives I got later, due to petter read stability and much quicker access times. And very little spin up delay.