HELP! DAE 7x and DAE quality 10?

Ok, I have built a new HTPC and tried two different brand new drives - both are showing me DAE top speeds of around 7x...WTF? The DAE quality is showing as 10 on Nero CD-DVD Speed.

one is the SAMSUNG SH-182M and the other is an NEC/Optiarc. Both are brand new from newegg and should be (IMO) ripping much faster.

Any ideas ? I tried a new cable. The PC is top rate - C2Duo, 2GB of Ram.

Sounds like DMA is off, run a transfer rate and burst rate test and post the result here.

Hi jcrash07, welcome to CDFreaks!

Since your thread isn't about Media Testing/Identifying Software but rather about other topics, I've moved it to the Newbie forum.

* * Moved thread * *

Well, here is the deal.

As it turns out, the motherboard I bought has just one PATA connection. The rest are SATA. My thinking was, ok get a PATA DVD and SATA Hd's.

Well, turns out this PATA connector is really managed via some other driver. Without the motherboard RAID driver installed, it will only allow PIO, no DMA. Transfer rates suck. So, I installed the RAID driver and now transfer rates are good but DAE is maxing out at 12x - still much lower than I would want.

BTW, once you install that driver, you no longer see the connection that the CD/DVD is on listed in the device manager under IDE connections. So, I guess I'm going to buy a SATA DVD.