Mike Echo wrote:

1. What could have changed my drives' speeds in the first place?

Windows has a habit of changing the transfer mode of parallel ATA
interfaces limiting maximum transfer speed. It does it automatically when
it detects controller errors. It has been a troublesome area depending on
which IDE controller you have. Depending on the controller it might inherit
the transfer mode set (or decided) by the BIOS.

De- and re-installing the drives probably set the mode back to default.

You need UDMA33 mode and preferably UDMA66 mode for high speed DVD drives.

You need 80 way IDE cables for UDMA66 and they are preferable for UDMA33.

You might find some information and options in the property pages for your
controller in device manager.


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