DVD Access slow

[Elexorien]

Is it normal for a DVD to take over an hour (more like 2) to be copied to the hard drive?
Average transfer speed seems to be around 500 KB/s (and fluctuating wildly)
It seems that periodically it stalls, goes to about 100KB/s then slowly reves up to 500-600. After about 90% done it finally breaks 1MB/s (due to reaching the outer tracks) but still drops to less than 100 KB/s and working back up.

The disk does not audiably change speeds (cant hear it reving, stays quiet)

Also while copying from the disk, system performance is horrible. I cant really do anything while I'm copying.

Dive is:
hdc: HL-DT-ST DVD-RW GWA-4165B, ATAPI CD?DVD-ROM drive (as reported by dmesg cause its a prebuild system with presumably a no name brand drive)
hdc: ATAPI 126x DVD-DROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache

System:

AMD64 3500+
1 Gig RAM
Gentoo 2.6.18-r2 (x86)
KDE 3.5

I'm using ivman hal and dbus to handle automounting
Will having it in fstab and or useing all 3 of the above cause a conflict?

It was automatically added to fstab, and after reading the handbook I emerged hal, dbus and ivman

It just seems odd that Windows was able to burn them in about 6-10 minutes yet it takes almost 2 hours to copy them back to my hard drive...

[MotivatedTea]

If your system performance goes way down while reading from your DVD, then either your DVD is badly scratched (but I assume you have already checked for that), or you might not have DMA enabled on the drive. You can check to see if it is and enable it if it isn't with hdparm.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Use_hdparm_to_improve_IDE_device_performance
You should also make sure DMA is enabled in your HD. Disclaimer: Be careful when playing around with parameters for your harddisk. (Back up first!) Enabling DMA should be safe; pretty much all drives these days should support it, and if a drive doesn't support DMA, Linux should just time out and give up. But some of the more exotic parameters can be dangerous if they're not supported by your drive.

[Elexorien]

Thank you very much!

Im down to 12 minutes from 2 hours

The file transfer started at 5.5 MB/s and is still climbing!

Much appreciated!