Real World DVD/CD access speeds with USB based drive?

I tried to figure this out from Googling, but all I got was a million references on the potential speed of a drive and a USB 2 or 3 (no difference since they're not the limiting factor). I couldn't find people listing actual results.

So, what are your results? I'm trying to decide if the player I bought is good, bad, or indifferent.

For the record, my initial test are just copying a 2gb file on a DVD to the internal SSD. System is plenty fast, ports are USB 3.2 EX. I can get 540 mb/s from a USB based SSD to the internal SSD). Player is supposedly 8x DVD, so theoretically ~ 10MB/s.

Is expected? 4 - 4.5 mb/s real world?. Or is this player a dog?

I think the speed of an ODD such as 8X, 16X, etc., is not the same as the data transfer speed. Usually copying from a Source to a Destination has the OS copying into memory then writing out of memory, amount of RAM as well as the Virtual Memory setting can have an effect..

If you've ever had a CD or DVD shatter in the drive, you'll realize there is a real limit to the absolute maximum speed you can read, typically writing is quite a bit slower. I've seen a CD come apart twice, both times it destroyed the drive as well.

So, let's start with definitions:

1x speed on CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray media is defined like this:

CD: 150KB/Sec
DVD: 1.38MB/Sec
BLU-RAY: 4.5MB/Sec

So, if your DVD drive is truly capable of reading at 8x speed ACROSS THE ENTIRE DISC then we should expect a transfer rate of 11.04MB/Sec (1.38 x 8). This is a speed that ANY HDD or SSD should be able to handle with ease. Everything else in the system should be able to handle such low rates with absolute ease, so if you are getting slower transfer rates then the problem is almost certainly the actual drive or media that is causing a retries.

My optical drive is an LG WH16NS60 in an external USB enclosure. For DVD, it's spec'd to read at X16, but in CAV mode (constant angular velocity). The nominal speeds are:


As a test, I prepared a single layer DVD with a 4.575GB single file on it. When I transferred the file to an SSD on the PC, the transfer rate steadily increased to over 21 MBps (according to Win11). Didn't quite get to 16X (22.2MBps).

If your drive is also CAV, its transfer rate would be expected to vary from 4.57MBps near the disc center to 11.1MBps at the edge.

Is the unnamed drive CAV, CLV (constant linear velocity, so the RPMs vary depending on where you are radially on the disc), or partial CLV (CAV near the center, CLV farther out, to limit the max RPMs)?