WH16NS40 Stuck at 2x Speed

[Rubiker]

Hello, everyone! I'm new to MakeMKV and ripping, and have run into the frustration of my drive being stuck at 2x speed for all my rips. (actually, it usually sits at 1.8x or 1.9x). I'll detail my setup below, and how I have it setup. Hoping someone can help me pinpoint how to speed up my drive so I don't have to sit for an hour per disc-

• Drive: WH16NS40-NS50
• Flashed Firmware: HL-DT-ST-BD-RE_WH16NS40-NS50-1.05-NM00900-212005061440.bin
• Enclosure: OWC Mercury Pro, Sata>USB3.0, passed through UnRaid to my VM
• System: Windows 10 Home Virtual Machine hosted on my UnRaid server

Process:
Factory firmware 1.05 came on this new drive. I have so far flashed it only once directly to the "HL ...1440.bin" listed above (sourced from Mike's post here: https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic ... 19&t=19113). I used the built-in MakeMKV command line flasher following the "ultra haxor guide v2" video on youtube (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyQV1aPlbow)

I have confirmed this process worked to unlock Libre Drive mode without issue, and have successfully ripped one of my 4K discs at slower speeds. I've read about riplock/silent play, and seen plenty of other posts saying the WH16NS40 should be ripping at closer to 4-6x speeds. I'm not sure if I missed a step, or if I have a setting wrong in my MakeMKV.

Silent Play / RipLock:
I believe my drive may have a 'silent play' option turned on, somehow. I've read about this setting tripping up other posters, and have tried going through the hardware menus in Windows 10 to find the silent play property to disable it. I could not find that option/property in any of the menus (or within the Hardware>Details>Property dropdown). See my source on that: https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic ... 370#p58370

Does anyone know if I missed a step in my flashing, or if there is something I can do to try to disable the silent play / riplock feature of my drive that is keeping it to a max of 2x speeds?

Thanks so much to Mike for this wonderful site and program. I've got a sizable library that I'm trying to backup, and increasing the speed to 4x+ would be a huge timesaver!



FINAL UPDATE / SOLUTION:

See: https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic ... 78#p104978

This ended up being an issue with my UnRaid setup. I was simply passing my OWC enclosure's USB connection directly through to my Windows Virtual Machine within UnRaid. I adjusted my setup to pass through the controller for a block of USB ports off my back panel, and the speeds increased to the expected 4-7x. Seems the OWC enclosure doesn't like being passed through directly, and because it's all USB 3+, it needed the entire controller passed through to reach top transfer speeds.

[Billycar11]

You just need to clean the discs or your drive is defective you did nothing wrong
But it's probably the disc even if it's new they sometimes need to be cleaned

[Rubiker]

You just need to clean the discs or your drive is defective you did nothing wrong
But it's probably the disc even if it's new they sometimes need to be cleaned

Hi, Billy! Thanks for taking the time to answer! I've seen your name pop up a lot here in my research, and am thankful to hear that I didn't miss any steps myself. I'm curious if you could elaborate more, though? In particular, I'm curious about the defective drive explanation.

I understand how a dirty disc could cause a slower read speed, however I'd like to rule that out as I have imported 22 movies (1x 4k, the rest are regular Blu-rays), and three discs of a TV series on Blu-ray so far at this seemingly locked lower 1.7-1.9x read speed. If this was isolated to a handful of discs, I would agree that it could be a dirty disc or two, but all of them doing this seems unlikely.

I would find it odd for a drive to be defective/hardware-limited to the 'almost 2x' speed. It seems to me to be much more likely a software issue as it seems the drive is treating all media as a 'playback media', similar to how riplock/silent play would limit the drive speed to keep playback quiet while watching media.

I Also Attempted Registry Speed Edit
I forgot to mention in my original post as well- I attempted Mike's registry edit to increase drive speed by adding the "0=99" and other variations to my registry. This resulted in a much faster drive spin. It was a lot louder, but was still only reading the discs at the ~1.9x rate. The drive would spin up for 1-2 minutes, then quiet down for 30-60 seconds, then spin up again. The read speed never changed even though the disc was spinning faster. I did encounter one disc which refused to be read while this registry edit was in place. Once I blanked the registry entry again, the drive returned to the quiet operation throughout a rip, and that problematic disc was ready accurately finally.

All of this would lead me to believe, I guess, that it could be a defective laser/reader unit inside that is having to recheck the data over and over, keeping it at that speed? Or could it be software limited somehow to only throughput ~8mb/s? I should note, that the speed never changes. It stays relatively constant at 1.7x-1.9x through the entire ~1.25-1.5 hour of ripping time per 1080p disc.


If you still suspect a defective drive, I suspect I could return it to NewEgg and get another to try. Would there be any chance that flashing my NS40 to NS60 libredrive firmware might help? (I've seen suggestions that crossflashing to the NS60 would allow faster read speed)

Thanks so much for helping me problem solve this and hopefully save me some time! I appreciate it, and am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the above!

I've also read suggestions elsewhere that running an internal drive in an enclosure could add the possibility of the SATA->USB interface in the enclosure being another bottleneck or failure point.

[Coopervid]

I would as a first step eliminate UnRaid in your chain. Could you do that?

[dcoke22]

I've also read suggestions elsewhere that running an internal drive in an enclosure could add the possibility of the SATA->USB interface in the enclosure being another bottleneck or failure point.

I've got an actual WH16NS60 in a Mercury Pro external case connected via USB 3. With the right discs, I will sometimes get 7x or higher rip speeds. The case and USB are not limiting factors. The quality of the disc, the cleanliness and sometimes luck seems to the actual limiting factors.

MakeMKV will support more than one drive at the same time. I also have an ASUS drive in another Mercury Pro case. If I get a new season of a TV show and have several discs to rip at once, I use both drives at the same time.

[Rubiker]

As a follow up, I just tried opening the disk and transferring the larest .m2ts file manually, and am only seeing transfer speeds of 8-9mb/s.

Going off of Billy's thoughts from earlier, this may mean the drive itself has a reading or data flow issue. I'm not sure if a reflash to another version (and then back again) might clear up some issue that happened during the initial flash? Or if it truly is a hardware issue (like a poorly oriented lens/sensor that's having to read data over multiple passes.

The data rate when transferring held a cyclical pattern going faster and slower, bouncing between 8mb/s and 9mb/s. This "faster, slower, faster, slower" cycle makes me think there may be an issue with the drive that is affecting data reading either at the sensor, or maybe in the buffer/data flow?

I'm not a fan of having to spend money to return the drive to NewEgg just to get another. I've read Billy's comments in other threads saying the LG drives have a higher failure rate than other brands. Just wish I knew why it seemed like the Silent Play / slow data transfer is a thing here, and not in other drives that've been flashed?

[Billycar11]

As a follow up, I just tried opening the disk and transferring the larest .m2ts file manually, and am only seeing transfer speeds of 8-9mb/s.

Going off of Billy's thoughts from earlier, this may mean the drive itself has a reading or data flow issue. I'm not sure if a reflash to another version (and then back again) might clear up some issue that happened during the initial flash? Or if it truly is a hardware issue (like a poorly oriented lens/sensor that's having to read data over multiple passes.

The data rate when transferring held a cyclical pattern going faster and slower, bouncing between 8mb/s and 9mb/s. This "faster, slower, faster, slower" cycle makes me think there may be an issue with the drive that is affecting data reading either at the sensor, or maybe in the buffer/data flow?

I'm not a fan of having to spend money to return the drive to NewEgg just to get another. I've read Billy's comments in other threads saying the LG drives have a higher failure rate than other brands. Just wish I knew why it seemed like the Silent Play / slow data transfer is a thing here, and not in other drives that've been flashed?

its not a silent play issue that maxes out at 8x
it could be as others said part of the vm is messing things up would be best to try without it to eliminate it as a cause its probably the drive but best to be sure.
and you don't need to pay to send it back to Newegg i get from them all the time just do a chat and ask for a return label since its defective you should not have to pay
it wouldn't hurt to try flashing some WH16NS60 firmware but i dont think it will help
also its not just the lg drive its also asus they are the same just a rebrand

[Rubiker]

As a follow up, I just tried opening the disk and transferring the larest .m2ts file manually, and am only seeing transfer speeds of 8-9mb/s.

Going off of Billy's thoughts from earlier, this may mean the drive itself has a reading or data flow issue. I'm not sure if a reflash to another version (and then back again) might clear up some issue that happened during the initial flash? Or if it truly is a hardware issue (like a poorly oriented lens/sensor that's having to read data over multiple passes.

The data rate when transferring held a cyclical pattern going faster and slower, bouncing between 8mb/s and 9mb/s. This "faster, slower, faster, slower" cycle makes me think there may be an issue with the drive that is affecting data reading either at the sensor, or maybe in the buffer/data flow?

I'm not a fan of having to spend money to return the drive to NewEgg just to get another. I've read Billy's comments in other threads saying the LG drives have a higher failure rate than other brands. Just wish I knew why it seemed like the Silent Play / slow data transfer is a thing here, and not in other drives that've been flashed?

its not a silent play issue that maxes out at 8x
it could be as others said part of the vm is messing things up would be best to try without it to eliminate it as a cause its probably the drive but best to be sure.
and you don't need to pay to send it back to Newegg i get from them all the time just do a chat and ask for a return label since its defective you should not have to pay
it wouldn't hurt to try flashing some WH16NS60 firmware but i dont think it will help
also its not just the lg drive its also asus they are the same just a rebrand

Ah, that's good to know! I thought silent play was keeping it to 2x. Thanks for clearing that up!

I tried flashing the drive twice again with the same firmware (saw somewhere that it could take a few times to take?). I've also now cross-flashed the drive to use WH16NS60 1.03 firmware, and encountered the same speed limit issue. The drive is setup to save files to a pair of NVME cache drives on my UnRaid network (same machine, different VMs, essentially), so I don't think the bottleneck is related to where I'm saving it. I've tried saving it within my own VM's allocated disk space as well, and it was running at the same rate as it was saving it to my array cache. I might've understand a speed bottleneck being possible if I was saving directly to one of my HDDs in my UnRaid array, but alas... I'll try running a couple of discs through MakeMKV on my laptop and see if I get the same issues. I suspect I will, but it's something else to try to rule things out at least!

I'll probably keep the drive for now and keep fiddling for a few days. If it continues to drive me crazy, and no new insights are posted, I might return it and get another to try out. Thanks for the tip about contacting their support people for a label! That's very helpful to know!

[Coopervid]

Let us know the result of this test please:

"I'll try running a couple of discs through MakeMKV on my laptop and see if I get the same issues."

[Rubiker]

Let us know the result of this test please:

"I'll try running a couple of discs through MakeMKV on my laptop and see if I get the same issues."

I hooked up my drive to my Macbook this evening, and started ripping a film which I just finished ripping to my main desktop. Interestingly, the drive stuck at 2.0x exactly, around 8.9mb/s for the first few minutes before I cancelled it. Still didn't break through the 2x wall, though. The drive usually sits at 8.5mb/s 1.9x speed on my desktop, though. Not sure what that says.

[Billycar11]

I hooked up my drive to my Macbook this evening, and started ripping a film which I just finished ripping to my main desktop. Interestingly, the drive stuck at 2.0x exactly, around 8.9mb/s for the first few minutes before I cancelled it. Still didn't break through the 2x wall, though. The drive usually sits at 8.5mb/s 1.9x speed on my desktop, though. Not sure what that says.

i think its time for an exchange then

[Rubiker]

I hooked up my drive to my Macbook this evening, and started ripping a film which I just finished ripping to my main desktop. Interestingly, the drive stuck at 2.0x exactly, around 8.9mb/s for the first few minutes before I cancelled it. Still didn't break through the 2x wall, though. The drive usually sits at 8.5mb/s 1.9x speed on my desktop, though. Not sure what that says.

i think its time for an exchange then

Think you're right. I've had multiple discs run into troubles since last night. Usually it'll get about 10% completed and hang up, the data transfer stops completely and the estimate time keeps climbing. Disc won't eject until I manually kill the enclosure's power and then turn it back on. Is this similar to the 'sleep bug' I read about?

I'll be sending NewEgg a RMA request today and hoping the next drive doesn't fall into weirdness.


Followup question- should I attempt to flash the drive back to factory firmware prior to returning it? Does it matter? Or will it simply get thrown in the recycle bin and never checked? At a glance, the MK firmware I put on it appears to report as the same 1.05 firmware that came on it, so maybe if checked they won't notice the firmware was tampered with?

[Billycar11]

I never changed the firmware back on the ones I returned probably somewhere around 70 I wouldn't worry about it

[Rubiker]

Awesome. I got my RMA label and shipped it back today. I'll report back when I get the replacement tested. Thanks for the help everyone! I really appreciate it!

[Rubiker]

Final update, I think!

Decided to just flat out return the old drive to Newegg (since they don't crosship, adding 2-3 weeks delay). Picked up a new one from Amazon.I was still getting the 8.3M/s [1.9x] speed, and decided to dig a little deeper on how my system was setup-

This ended up being an issue with UnRaid entirely. My virtual machine had the OWC enclosure's USB connection 'passed through' directly to my VM. After some research, I found out that some USB devices don't like being passed through directly to virtual machines. I reconfigured my system to pass through an entire USB controller to my VM (multiple USB ports, instead of this single device), and voila! I'm seeing 7.5x speeds, around 32 M/s speed now. It's cut down a 60+ minute rip to just about 20 minutes.

Probably didn't need to return the other one, but with it continuing to freeze up on me and not getting any better performance on my baremetal Mac laptop (no hypervisor/unraid setup), I don't feel quite so bad... especially since purchasing the replacement on Amazon saved me about $10 off the price on Newegg.

Thanks to Billy and Coopervid! Appreciate all the help figuring this out. Cooper, your question about UnRaid being the issue was stuck in the back of my mind and finally got me over the finish line! Now I'll be able to finish out my collection in half the time or less.