Reduce CD-ROM Speed

   2008-09-09      Tech      linux

Have you ever asked yourself why your DVD Player is much more quiet than the CD-ROM drive in your PC? It’s because playing audio/video just needs a reduced reading performance which calms down your drive a lot.

In Linux you have two possibilities: eject or hdparm.

Eject can read out and set all possible speeds for your drive: To read it out use eject -X(capital X!)
Set your desired speed variable with

eject -x n

where n is a number like 2,4,8 or so on.

For hdparm you just type

hdparm -En /dev/cdrom

where n is the desired speed like 2,4,8 and so on and /dev/cdrom is the propriate device.
Of course the speed must be set before playing a medium ;)