I made more tests on the performance of the CD drives.

cd0 at atapibus0 drive 1: <ASUS CD-S400/A, , V2.1H>
cd1 at atapibus1 drive 0: <Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus 8100, YMW375ECHU,
1.0g>
...
cd0(pciide0:0:1): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (using DMA data
transfers)
cd1(pciide0:1:0): using PIO mode 0, DMA mode 1 (using DMA data transfers)

I used the same CD for all the test; NetBSD and Windows NT were booted
from the HD, Linux and FreeBSD from a bootable CD. Linux, FreeBSD and
NetBSD were tested with: 'dd if=/dev/cdxx of=/dev/null bs=32k'.  Windows
NT was tested with 'xcopy' (which means that the transfer rate of NT should
be higher.)

                      ASUS 40x (cd0)     HP 24x (cd1)
    NetBSD 1.4.1          360 K/s          860 K/s
    FreeBSD 3.3          1900 K/s         2000 K/s
    Linux Debian 2.1     2422 K/s         not tested
    Windows NT 4         1496 K/s         not tested

I changed the cd0 flags in the kernel config file to disable Ultra-DMA
and DMA but the performance was the same.

Searching DejaNews and www.asus.com was not useful, although on
the former I found an e-mail complaining that the ASUS CD-S400 was
slow under Win98 (~300 K/sec)  (alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus,
10/11/1998).

Robert Elz wrote:
> ... I do have an ASUS 50x (cd2), a XXXX 44x (cd3) both on IDE (both
> as slaves) and 2 TEAC 32x (on scsi) (cd0 and cd1)
I think that you need a new CD ROM drive ... I could sell you
my ASUS  :-)

Regards,
Federico Lupi