I have recently replaced the DVD drive in my computer, and although I am impressed with the read and write speeds, I am not pleased with what it does to my computer while using it. Basically, as soon as I read or write anything using the drive, my computer slows down to an agonizingly slow rate. It's not a huge concern since most of my burning software requires the computer to be dedicated anyways (danm you nero) but it's making it quite difficult to play games without no-cd patches, which i'd perfer not to have to use. The only major difference from this drive to my old one, other than speed, is that this drive is an SATA drive. Although, I'm still running it through IDE as I dont have enough SATA cables. I would blame my system for just having too much stuff running, except it's fresh off of a reinstall of windows. As far as I'm aware, all of my drivers are up to date. My system itself is a fairly fast machine, as i'm running an overclocked core 2 duo each core is currently running at 2.6 ghz. I'm also running with only 1 gig of ram, but i dont see that as being the issue either, as my gig of video memory handles almost every graphical aspect of my computer, releiving the ram of anything graphically related at all. If anyone has any ideas on why this is happening, and how to stop it from happening, it would be pretty helpfull.

Are you trying to play games while burning? Are you downloading while burning?

no, I dont do anything while burning, the problem is that I cant do anything while even just reading....which is concequentially making it hard to play games.

Is the drive an IDE type connection? Go to Device Manager and expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controller listing. Righ click on the primary IDE channel and select Properties> Advanced settings. Is the channel running in a DMA mode? If so, what one? Repeat for the Secondary channel if present.