IT WORKS!!!

Slowing down fast / modern (one you can buy in the shops - today - not second hand) CD/DVD drives

The drive I am using is a 22x Samsung IDE DVD Writer: http://www.samsung.com/ae/consumer/computers- … type=prd_detail

It's very fast, which is great for installing software, but there are 2 issues:

- The drive is noisy
- Worse is the spin-up / spind-own pauses

If you move around folders the drive constantly spins-up and down and the machine waits for the drive to start reading.

Back in the old days up to 4x I believe (or was it 8x?) drives wouldn't spin-down. They just span at a constant speed all the time and access was ASAP. No delay whatsoever.

So I was looking for a solution to this problem. I remember that I had a TEAC CD drive as a kid, which you could tell to slow down. So I was hoping this wold still work with todays drives, and guess what! It did 👍

This is the current state of my time machine:

This is the Samsung 22x IDE DVD Writer:

I use a Windows 98SE boot disk, because they come with CD drivers and should work with any drive.

The config.sys line for the drive looks like this (I did change the drive name to Mau1wurf)

device=oakcdrom.sys /D:Mau1wurf

And the boot screen looks like this:

Drive works fine, but you get the spin-up and spin-down delays and the drive gets a bit noisy (not very loud though...)

Now in order to slow the drive down, we need to get the TEAC CD driver. Well good on TEAC, they still host this driver!

You can grab it here: http://www.teac.com/DSPD/downloads/drivers/atapicd.exe

It will extract 2 files, the driver and documentation. However the slowdown option isn't covered in this document...

For this example I copied the driver (TEAC_CDI.SYS) on the Windows 98SE bootdisk. Obviously you can copy it onto your HDD and change the following line accordingly.

Next you either replace the line in config.sys I quoted above with the new TEAC driver (instead of the OAK one)

Replace this:

device=oakcdrom.sys /D:Mau1wurf

with this:

DEVICE=A:\TEAC_CDI.SYS /D:Mau1wurf /S:4

The /S:4 tells the drive to spin at 4x speed (I did a DOS test and it reported 8x speed so I am not sure what speed is correct, however the issue was adressed)

You get this boot screen, with confirmation that the /S:4 command worked:

From here on my drive was fast and ready from the get go. No spin-up and spin-down! No noisy drive as well.

Job well done!

Congratulations! 😀 I would be very interested to learn what impact the TEAC system driver has on DOS memory usage. Please can you tell us what your DOS "memory profiles" (for want of a better phrase) are when 1) using the TEAC driver, and then 2) using the oakcdrom driver? I usually do the following at the DOS command prompt, to work out what memory is available:

mem /c /p

Thanks. Also, you say that your DOS test reported the DVD-drive as being 8x. I wonder if there is a test you can run on the drive in DOS, to ascertain what the actual data transfer rate is. I believe that 4x will equate to 4 x 150 = 600 KiB/s.

Edit: Perhaps you could use speedsys in pure DOS, to test the DVD-ROM drive? I think you can select what type of drive you want to test. You can "toggle" between HDD testing, and optical drive testing.

Speedsys thinks it's a 8x drive. But AFAIK 8x drive back in the day did spin-up right? Well I am happy either way as the drive is now silent and super fast. No delays when launching stuff even when you haven't accessed it for a time.

It is possible that my drive is so new that 8x is the slowest speed without having to spin-up and down?

Standard my drive tests as 16x although it can read CDs at 40x per datasheet. Not sure if this is because of the board being old or some other reason.

My Bootdisk doesn't know the mem command 😀 Still waiting for my CF cards so I can install 6.22

The filesize of the TEAC driver is smaller however. Almost a third.

Very interesting regarding the TEAC driver memory size "foot print".

Just FYI, I noticed something interesting when I was testing old IDE CD-ROM drives. If you listen closely to the really old ones (eg 2x and 4x), many of them stop spinning after approximately 30 seconds if no "file related activity" has occured, in either a game or general disc access. However, a small number of drives don't do this - instead, they continue to spin regardless of whether any access is required to the disc or not. I seem to remember that the old Sony drives did this, and I didn't like them because of it.

WOW.
This driver is awesome. No more noise anymore, nothing to resonate, and I don't have time to have some tea while the CD spining up/down. 😁
Thx. 😀

CDBQ works fine for my LG-8164B dvdrom... I set it to 8x and enjoy the silence 😊

keropi wrote:

CDBQ works fine for my LG-8164B dvdrom... I set it to 8x and enjoy the silence 😊

Where did you find that driver?

I pm'ed locutus and pointed me to a German forum he posts:

http://www.dosforum.de/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2329&start=0

now my p200mmx only makes noise from it's cpu fan... 😁
this little gem must be more known! 😊

Great!!! Another fantastic discovery!!! DVD capability with old school spin speed (and old school cd-quietness) in a classic system!! I'm using an actual TEAC CD-56E 6x (with Teac's very own TEAC_CDI.SYS) cd rom in one of my systems. All these times, I've just been using that driver with the Teac drive alone. (Just let me know if the driver can cope up with copying large files or directories off the DVD drive.)

Edit : I've heard of CD Be Quiet (CBQ as mentioned by keropi), but haven't used it. Worth a try though!

I doubt that you need any special driver to support DVDs.

yeah, like in amiga (where dvd's where not used when the OS was developed), cd/dvd driver just works

keropi: are you a Depeche Mode fan, since the "enjoy the silence" part with a blush afterwards, gave me an association to the song of the same name by them.

WolverineDK wrote:

keropi: are you a Depeche Mode fan, since the "enjoy the silence" part with a blush afterwards, gave me an association to the song of the same name by them.

He's a metal-dude! 😁

yeah, "enjoy the silence: is what CDBQ outputs when it makes it's job and the blush because I felt good with a noiseless dvd rom on my dos machine 🤣
Amigaz got it right 😁

Amigaz: I am a metal dude myself, but I like so many genres and bands/groups etc. and I used to be a Depeche Mode fan, so that is why I asked, and also there are metal covers of that song too.

Hi

just wanted to let you guys know, there's a new version out and a project page now:

http://cdbq.dosforum.de/

Please update to the new version as soon as possible as it's much more reliable and has a better way of handling errors.

If something doesn't work, let me know.

locutus

I was almost ready to buy a 8X CDROM off ebay when it occurred to me that maybe somebody at VOGONS had figured out how to slow down a modern drive in DOS.

The TEAC driver and CD Be Quiet both work on my NEC ND-3550A DVD-RW. I tested with Wing Commander 3 in DOS and without smartdrive. WC3 has a CDROM benchmark. Also loaded the game so I could hear the video streaming.

CDBQ settings that work:
-s600 = 600KB/s (very quiet)
-s1500 = 1200-1400KB/s (gentle breeze noise level 🤣)
-s3000 = ~2600KB/s (much louder)

Does not work on Sony DDU1615 (rebranded Lite On)

retro games 100 wrote:

Congratulations! 😀 I would be very interested to learn what impact the TEAC system driver has on DOS memory usage.

The Teac CD-ROM driver uses approxy 13KB of UMB on my machine.

Edit: I just changed back to UIDEJR, the Teac driver was causing music problems in SCUMM games.

Hey guys,

just wanted to let you know that there's a new version out.

Regards
locutus

I've not heard of this tool until now...very handy!! I'm looking forward to trying this out, it would be very nice to quiet down my noisy CD-ROM drive.