Optical Drive ridiculously loud... Is there any fix?

Well, my loud slot load drive is fine when I'm importing something but when I'm using it for playback I find myself straining to hear the audio. Is there any fix that'll make the drive quieter?

 

a hammer will work

I don't know of any way, you could call Dell and try and get a replacement CD drive.

couple other workarounds...
1. noise cancelling headphones(I use my Zune ones and they work fantastic)
2. rip the media first than play it off the hard disk this won't be practical if your into Blu-ray... but Audio CD and DVD should be fine.

 

don't you have any DVD drive acoustic silencer software installed by DELL?

check in the task tray, a little picture of a CD?

 

No... Am I supposed to?

 

probably not, but my toshiba has it so I though dell was the same.

maybe there is some driver you're missing?

 

Yes, Simply use Nero Drive Speed to set the drive to whatever speed you want. I set my drive to 4x or 8x when playing audio CDs. 100% silent.

 

What would be a downside to putting it at 4x or 8x? Like what's the difference on things? I know I'm sounding confusing.

I mean, why would Dell make it a faster drive speed and louder if you could just make it slower and it'd be the same?

 

the noise is probably a combination of the drive coming up to high speed and a slightly off balance disk wobbling at that speed.

Unless you find a way to slow the drive down, there isn't a lot you'll be able to do.

I've learned to live with it. Evey thin (laptop) drive I've had in the past 5 years and many of the full-sized desktop drives I've owned all make this kind of noise. The reason you might not hear it from the desktop drives is that they are buried in a desktop case and somewhat muffled by the fan noise.

 

Bump, can someone answer my question on post #7?

What would be a downside to putting it at 4x or 8x? Like what's the difference on things? I know I'm sounding confusing.

I mean, why would Dell make it a faster drive speed and louder if you could just make it slower and it'd be the same?

 

Because 8x is the standard, and generally people use it at 8x and can do things twice as fast*. By the way, Dell doesn't make the drives.

A DVD program like WinDVD generally has an option for reducing drive speed when playing a movie.

When you play a movie, you have low transfers for a long period of time, you don't necessarily want to watch the movie at 2x, so speed doesn't matter, but if you're copying files, you want the fastest speed so you can get the files in a shorter amount of time.

 

hey.....i saw somewhere their is a rubber plug for that problem i don't remember where.

 

If it's really loud and the laptop starts to vibrate I'd lower the speed to prevent damage to both ...disk and drive. CD 4x is about 600k/s and DVD 4x is about 4.5Mb/s. If this speed meets your needs and nothing lags there's no reason to use max speed. Some disks will make more noise than others as they're not 100% balanced and they're probably less expensive. I've noticed it's better to write files on DVDs rated at 8x speed using 4x burning speed. I can't imagine what a Kenwood drive will do to an unbalaced CD at 72x.

 

I'm sorry but isn't 24X the standard for CD in Notebooks? (52X for Desktop drives). 4X or 8X would have a much slower rotation speed, which would lower the motor speed/vibration in the unit, therefore less noise coming from the drive. 4X would be fast enough to read auto track data without any issues.

But to solve your problem... go Digital! Rip that Audio CD as a FLAC or high Bitrate MP3 and shelve it. Why use the actual CD when you have the convenience of a computer?

 

Whups.. I thought we were talking DVD speeds, I haven't touched a CD in ages...