Limiting Cdrom Speed

Is your CD-ROM drive louder than your vacuum cleaner? There are some situations where you might want to slow it down, such as when:

your drive is connected over a slow USB-1 link and the excess spin speed is pointless
your application accesses the drive sporadically, resulting in wasted spin-up time on each access
you want to hear what's coming out of your computer's speakers, or to hear yourself think

It's possible to limit the read speed of a mounted CDROM using a trick with the readcd utility. After the disk is set, but before mounting, run:

readcd dev=0,0 speed=8 sectors=0-0 f=/dev/null

or for ATAPI CDROM

readcd dev=ATAPI:/dev/cdrom speed=8 sectors=0-0 f=/dev/null

adjusting the dev and speed parameters accordingly. This should work with any drive that has "MMC" support. To find out the device numbers of your drives, use the cdrecord utility:

cdrecord -scanbus

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Last edited April 20, 2005 8:42 pm EDT (diff)