DriveSpeed 2000 is a utility to set the reading speed of a CD-ROM drive.
The ability for limiting the reading speed of a CD-ROM drive is a must have feature for high speed drives.
Although a high speed drive allows you to transfer data in less time, there are some disadvantages of using such a drive:
Noise
A drive faster then 24x is very noisy which is not surprising as the spindle speed can be as high as 12000 RPM which is much faster then for example a harddisc.
If the drive only needs to access the CD for a short period of time, for example software installation, then this is not such a big problem.
But it gets very irritating when you're using the drive to play MP3 files. In many cases the noise from the drive is louder then the sound from the audio file.
The data rate of a MP3 file is usually about 16 KB/sec (@128 kbps) which equals to approximately 0.1X! So a reading speed of 4X is more then adequate for playing MP3's.
Spinup/down times
Another disadvantage of high speed drives is that the spinup/spindown times are high too.
After a few seconds of inactivity the drive slows down. When the application needs more data from the CD, the drive spins up again. The spinup time can be as high as 10 seconds. In this time the application has to wait for the data and stops.
This is especially irritating when playing games.
Reading damaged discs
When a drive has trouble reading a disc, it automatically slows down and reads the bad sectors again.
After reading the bad sectors, the drive usually spins up again. If there are many errors on the disc then the drive will constantly spinup/spindown. This is very bad for the mechanical parts of the drive.
By slowing down the drive by software, the drive does not need to change the speed while reading a damaged disc.
Increase DAE speed
You can also use DriveSpeed 2000 to increase the DAE speed with some drives.
Asus drives for example set the default DAE speed to 8X while these drives are actually capable of DAE at up to 20X!
