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This is really annoying me as I have just had to replace my old one after it packed up after half a year.

So I have just bought and fitted this new drive from Samsung. First thing I stick in is The Orange Box, Steam installs and runs fine. Second thing I install is Unreal Tournament 3. While this is installing, I'm thinking to myself just how quiet is this drive as it can barely be heard over the CPU fan. I was playing guitar while it was installing so I don't know exactly how long it took to install, but I would have said it was fairly normal. So I reboot, try and run UT3 and it tells me that the application failed to start. So I was like, ok, it's probably because I'm in Win 7 (although it ran fine the previous time I had it installed on Win 7).

Anyway, so I come back a bit later and decide to see how good it is at ripping CDs. Stick in an audio CD (using Winamp Pro to begin with) and try ripping 12 tracks @320kbps in MP3. Come back after half an hour and it's still doing it, at 0.9x realtime. Ie. it would be quicker to listen to the CD than to rip it.

So the next thing I tried was just seeing if it would actually play the CD. But for some reason it is stuck on a playback speed of 0.9x realtime, which means that it basically skips and won't play properly. On closing Winamp I decided to see if it would play in WMP, same problem.. it just skips.

I went to the Samsung website, got the latest firmware and drivers and did a reboot. I pop the disc back in, and for some reason WMP autoruns (instead of the autorun menu), but this time it actually plays back fine. So I closed WMP and went back into Winamp to try ripping it again. Same problem, 0.9x realtime on both playback and ripping. Then when I went into WMP to try playing the CD it seems to have reverted to the original problem again.

Although oddly, I can get it to play properly if I just re-insert the disc and let it autorun WMP.

I also downloaded Nero Disc Speed to check that it could actually spin up properly, and it is showing the advertised read speeds of 48x so I actually have no idea what is going on.


Any help would be appreciated as this is incredibly frustrating. Cheers.

There must be something on with drivers or any other software but im not sure what.

Do you have a sufficient PSU? CD drives can be a major power sap because it's quite difficult to spin a CD to a ludicrous RPM. So much, in fact, I'm surprised they don't spin half speed and use two reader heads. Also check that no power saving settings are spinning down the drive.

Hmm it's not that, this drive has a lower power consumption than the old one. I was also able to get it spinning up to full RPM when using Nero Disc Speed so I'm still stumped.

There's been a lot of various issues with Windows 7 and disc drives. I personally had a few issues, and I believe someone else on this forum post about nearly the same thing.