Is there a way to turn on the read speed?

[Cormaster628]

I have a LG WH14NS40 Blur-ray burner, and from what I can tell everyone claims its not riplocked, however ripping movies with makemkv takes hours, because it's only reading at 2x. I can't find an option to turn up the read speed anywhere. I got this drive for christmas so I'm fairly new to the blu-ray burning world and kind of lost, and google searches just bring up vague results. I'm pulling my hair out here! Would dual-layer make a difference vs single layer? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Woodstock]

I have three of these drives in service on three different computers, and regularly see 5-8X rip speeds on BDs. I've seen as high as 17x on DVDs. It's rarely as low as 2x, except when starting a new track. So the drive IS capable of faster speeds.

Differences can be in the details, though. While the slowest machine I run one of these on is a 2-core Dell from 2005, it has very little else running on it... But I've seen those 8x and 17x speeds while running multiple copies of MakeMKV on that machine.

On my main machine, it stays below 4x on BDs when I'm also running Handbrake, because of memory limitations.

Are you directly attaching the drive to your computer via a SATA cable, or is there a USB/Firewire conversion involved? Is it an original SATA controller, or one of the newer 3- or 6Mb controllers?

[Cormaster628]

My PC isn't the fastest machine available but its no slouch and pretty up to date. Its a phenom II six core with 8 gig of DDR3. Motherboard is about 2 years old, but still pretty up to date, has Sata 6gb/s, ddr3. I pretty much beefed up my PC in 2011 to play battlefield 3. Anyway the bluray drive is attached straight to a sata port. A friend suggested I check my bios settings to see if my sata was set to IDE mode or ACHI. Sure enough it was on ahci, but unfortunately when I changed it, windows blue screened on start up and a Google search pretty much says you have to set that before you install windows. I've been meaning to check if I can just set the bluray drive to ahci, haven't gotten around to it (on my phone right now). Would that make a difference?

[Cormaster628]

Fixed it, for whatever reason it was showing 2 blu-ray drives in my computer, and showing my blu-ray burner and a scsi cd-rom drive as the second drive in device manager. I disabled the drive that didn't exist, and that seemed to be the source of the slow ripping because it's now ripping at 5x and the rates going up

[Woodstock]

You CAN change from legacy IDE to AHCI mode in Windows after install, but it takes a couple of steps. First is to zap a registry entry, which forces Windows to look at the BIOS on start-up, and install the AHCI drivers (the second step). I've done it to three computers myself, and it makes it so you can use eSATA devices that have hot-swap capability. There are several web pages, including at least one official Microsoft page, on doing so. It takes longer to FIND the stupid articles than it does to make the change!

Having a phantom device is usual, but not unheard of. I do know that MakeMKV can run fast with multiple actual devices....

[Woodstock]

Sent as a separate reply, because it contains a link that will require moderator approval.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

"Error message occurs after you change the SATA mode of the boot drive"

[Cormaster628]

Wow thanks so much for that. I actually meant to google that earlier today and forgot about it. Awesome!

[Cormaster628]

Anyone know if ahci can cause system instability? I can't run handbrake now without locking up the PC. Only difference is ahci mode enabled. Motherboard is Asrock 970 extreme4 if that helps

[Woodstock]

AHCI lets the drive communicate with Windows in more advanced ways, so the potential is there for a flaky drive to get "out of sync" with the system. Shouldn't happen, though.

Make sure you run Windows Update after turning it on; there are some drivers that do not necessarily get updated if a feature isn't turned on. Again, it shouldn't happen, but it does.