Maximum PC

In Win 7, I burnt the 527MB test folder to DVD+RW with Win7's built-in burning facility.

Dragging the folder to the drive and calculating took 4min 45sec. A good number of files or folders had boxes pop up, saying some files could only be burned without property sheets, or the file names were too long. Also, using Win7 to burn, I found there were 27,414 files on the DVD+RW. There are 25,886 files on the hard drive. When using ImgBurn or CDBurnerXP, the number of files burnt to the disc match the number on the hard drive at 25,886.

After burning, I tried to read the disc. "Calculating" the time and transfer speed took 4min 30sec. Transfer speeds started at a high of ±315KB/sec, and slowly dropped over the next ten minutes, until they reached a low of 81.9KB/sec, when I just hit Cancel.

Booting into XP Home, Windows Explorer put up an error message, saying that the data on the disc was "not compatible with this version of Windows", and was unreadable.

Rebooting into Win 7, reading and transfering data is as I mention above. Slow.

Still in Win7, I used WinZip to compress the 527MB folder to 321MB, and burned that to DVD+RW with ImgBurn. Copying the single 321MB Zip file from disc to Desktop took 1min 5sec, for a transfer rate of 4.86MB/sec.

My thoughts were that CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn may work burning the disk, but win7 may have problems reading the way the data was written to the cd/dvd. That is why I suggested just using the burn program provided by win7. I hope it is something simple like that.

Nasty

It may be something simple like that, but if I can't read the Win7-burned data at all in XP, then it's useless to me.
I am at the point now where I cannot tell if this is an issue with
* Windows 7 kernel/file handling or ATA/ATAPI drivers
* my chipset or motherboard
* my DVD combo burners

In XP do you have show hidden files and folders checked? In win 7 I had the same problem just in reverse and when I enabled show hidden files in Win 7 the files showed up...this was with a hard drive and a dvd that didn't show files and folders....now why this happened I have no idea at all. I had to click on the drive, click on Organize, click on folder and search options,show all folders, hit apply and presto there they were.

Nasty

My usual practice is to keep hidden files hidden, no matter the OS. I learned that lesson from Win95... some things it's just better to not touch.
I was poking through my BIOS last night and found that my boot drive (WD SATA II 160GB) had 32-bit transfers disabled. Not sure why, so I enabled it. No change, but then I really didn't expect any on a SATA drive. I also tried changing how the optical drives are detected, from "Auto" to "CD/DVD". That only made things slower!
I wondered if it wasn't the AMD SB710 chipset; I read it had a lot of problems that AMD couldn't solve with drivers, but in XP I'm not experiencing any issues at all. The vast majority of complaints regarding this problem seemed to come in 2009 and 2010. I'm not yet able to figure out what happened after 2010 that the problem seemed to go away.

At this point in time, my best educated guess and logical conclusion is that if all my hardware and software, and basic cut/copy/paste file handling etc all work perfectly well with XP, then the problem has to be with Vista and Windows 7 code. All this BS with tweaking and registry editing and all just should not have to be done. File cut/copy/paste worked fine up until Vista. Microsoft had to crap it up with animations and calculating eye candy instead of just keeping what wasn't broken.

Try going here and click on support and drivers

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/ ... rison.aspx

Choose an option in each category and see if a driver is available for your processor. It automatically checks your processor and tells you if a driver is available....maybe that is what you need to speed things up. I remember having a special driver for my old 4800 and it made a difference in how my pc ran.

Nasty

The only drivers that seem to apply to Win 7 is chipset and graphics.. which I've already installed many times, and AMD does not supply IDE drivers nor processor drivers. So that didn't work.

I remember downloading a dual-core optimizer for my own 4200+ back in the day, and there was a processor driver (amdk8.sys) as well. But for the K10 series of processors, the only drivers offered are supplied by Microsoft and are dated 2006. The present one I have is amdppm.sys, v.6.1.7600.16385(win7_rtm.090713.1255), and there is no updated driver available. From what I've seen, amdppm.sys is for a Phenom II chip. Some people have tried using amdk8.sys with some success, but only with XP, not Win 7.

I'm getting damn sick of this $#!+. I'd love to know how others fixed this non-network, non-USB problem, but no one ever posts anything about that, only complaints up to 2010.

Some motherboards have special sata ports for DVD drives, is that your case...read the manual for that info....or are your drives IDE and pinned wrong if you have one slaved to the other.

Nasty

Hm. An interesting proposition, Nasty.

My mobo manual does not specify that any SATA ports are slower or faster than any other, but all 1.5 or 3.0Gb/sec capable. Right now, I'm using ports 0,1,2 and 3, with 0 and 1 for the two SATA hard drives, and 2 and 3 for the burners. I will move the burners to 4 and 5 and try again.

The AMD SB710 chipset databook says there are three ways to configure the southbridge for SATA and IDE operation.

The SB710 SATA controller can operate in three modes:
1) All six channels can be configured as IDE mode. In this configuration, the programming interface of
two of the channels (4 and 5) is under the PATA controller
2) Four channels configured as SATA AHCI and channel 4 and 5 configured in IDE mode. In this
configuration, the programming interface of channel 4 and 5 are under the PATA controller
3) All six channels are configured as SATA AHCI mode.
Since I am not using AHCI at all, but IDE mode, you just may have something here, even though the BIOS does not seem to make any specific choices available.

The only IDE (=non-SATA) device I have is a PATA version of my SATA WD160GB HDD (PATA model WD1600AAJB, SATA model WD1600JS; even the firmware versions are identical) configured as Master on the single IDE cable, using Cable Select, as a slave storage drive.

You have no clue how I appreciate the help, both from you and Kleinkenstein. Now you know why I hang out here... other forums give me BS answers, like faulty or incompatible hardware, using third-party solutions like Teracopy, or simply giving up and living with it. I may have to do that and rely on booting into XP for data retrieval in a pinch, but you guys go the extra mile, and I'm grateful.

Moving the SATA optical drives to ports 4 and 5 had no effect.

I think it's safe to assume that this is a Windows bug, and apparently the geniuses at Microsoft either refuse to fix it or figure there aren't enough people who are complaining about it, never mind that this issue is known and admitted to have existed since Vista was released. My Toshiba Vista SP2 laptop acts the very same way. A guy I know is expecting delivery of a new Asus Win7 Home Premium 64 bit i5 rig this week. I warned him about this problem, and if it shows itself, he is gonna be one pissed PC owner.

Just plug "windows 7 slow dvd read" into Google and the multiple pages of similar tales of unresolved woe tell the whole story.

My optical drives spin up real fast and stay that way in XP, transferring the data in 6 minutes. In Windows 7 the drives spin up, then throttle down for some reason within 30 seconds, throughput plummets to 70-80KB/sec and transfer takes 90 minutes... if Explorer ever stops "Calculating" at all. That rules out busted or misconfigured hardware in my book. The only difference is a crippled OS.

I unfortunately have to say that since Microsoft knows about the problem yet refuses to address it with a patch or hotfix, my only remaining course of action is that I will need to dual boot into XP whenever I need to get data off my DVD+RW backups for many years to come.

PS: Here's a warped thought. Is it possible to consider hardware - in this case, a pair of identical optical drives - to be fully operational when used in one OS, and also be considered defective when used in another?

Just a thought....I always had problems when using cable select and chose slave over it whenever configuring hard drives and optical drives...still one more thing to try...

Nasty

Still fighting this? Yes. Absolutely nothing that's been suggested has helped. I'm grateful, but nothing's helped. If there is one thing I hate about computers, it's an unsolved/unsolvable problem that prevents me from doing my work. This is a big one.

It's always "check your DMA" or "Delete UpperFilter and LowerFilter" or "Disable BITS and/or Remote Differential Compression" or "You need a new cable/driver/motherboard/optical drive/brand of disc". In one Microsoft TechNet thread, a Microsoft software engineer actually suggested to work around the issue by spreading the files out over more burnt discs! I'm sorry, but if everything works fine in XP but not in 7, then it's the OS, not my friggin' hardware.

No wonder people still use XP. Win 7 has been one big headache after another. I swear I'm ready to take a shotgun to my PC.

If I had known in May 2012 when I bought 7 that this was going to be a problem I'd never have wasted my money on it. GUI gotchas, software compatibility problems, Windows Media Player 12, data loss, and now, not being able to read/copy/transfer my own backup data after writing it? Gimme a break.
Using and fooling around with a computer with XP was a blast. With 7, it's a pain in the ass.

Kleinkinstein, in all seriousness, if I am doing something wrong, I would like to know what it is so that this issue could be resolved.

I think I've found a workaround.
TrueCrypt file containers.
I just copied one file container of 3.5GB from DVD+RW to my Desktop.
Not only did the optical drive spin up and STAY spun up, but transfer started at 7.5MB/sec and finished at 10.7MB/sec.
3.5GB in 5min 27sec. That's speed I find useful.
An added benefit is uncrackable password protection for my data.

I'm still going to point at a borked SATA controller. I can't vouch for the DVD drive, but I've done a few transfer in the 100K file range with most of those files smaller than 50KB and it wasn't godawful slow.

I agree. It is very possible that it's crap. I've read bad reviews of the SB710 southbridge where people say it's very slow in Win7. I can't compare speeds to my old Biostar XP rig because that one had twin Pioneer IDE burners on a VIA chipset (two whole SATA ports!). I still miss the burners... they got roasted by a dying PSU. Best I ever had.

My friend got his PC on Tuesday.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6883220247
Brand spankin' new Intel i5 system, unknown hardware details except for a Seagate 1TB SATA HD, some generic optical disc burner (can't find any info at all on it ("ATAPI DVD A DH24ACSH" in Device Manager)). Installed the latest Intel drivers, all Windows Updates, defragged the HDD.
I put my DVD+RW test disc in the burner and opened Windows Explorer.
"Calculating" and "Discovering" the files on the disc took about 3 minutes.
It was possible to keep the disc in the optical drive and drill down into the disc and folder structure (not possible on my desktop or laptop) but was on the slow side.
Copying the 528MB worth of 27,000+ files to the Desktop had a transfer rate of around 2.2MB/sec; we aborted the test after 5 minutes. 528MB/2.2MB/sec = ±6 minutes estimated total time, or roughly equal to my present XP Home SP3 install.

I suspect Microsoft did that on purpose to help the record and movie industry by killing the throughput to discourage ripping music and movies. Call me paranoid if you want, but why can you transfer files in XP with no problems and in Win 7 you have problems and it never gets fixed....

Nasty

Because the guy is burning 50K+ files. It's not the data size that kills your transfer speed, it's the quantity of the files.

...so I see says the blind man...

Nasty