I know there is something wrong regarding my Optical Drive speeds. I am loading Two Worlds Two from disk and it has been over half an hour, and it's still not even halfway through.

I have also noticed this on other installations. I am pretty sure my optical drives aren't operating at SATA III speeds (or even SATA II) even though they are hooked up to SATA III ports with SATA III cables.

What should I look for?? I looked in bios, could find nothing. The drive itself was OEM and thus, came with no manual or anything to look at.

Any suggestions?

FWIW: Here's the specs:

i7-3770k
32 GB 1600MHz RAM
256 GB Samsung 830 Series SSD HD
3 TB Western Digital 7200RPM, 64MB cache, HD
2 Nvidia GeForce GTX 560ti's in SLI mode
top of the line ECS 1155 motherboard. (Golden Edition)

And this thing installs games from disks slower than my old computer. Something ain't right.

ADDED IN EDIT: Also, too, I hesitate to blame the drive itself, because I've got THREE optical drives in this (long story) and ALL THREE are slow at installing.

I just do NOT believe my optical drives are operating at SATA III, especially because everytime I boot up I see a fast message on my screen listing one of the optical drives (probably the boot one) and next to it shows "SATA I".

I think my optical drives are all operating at SATA I. And there is nothing in BIOS to change it.

Could it be bad wires??? Order all new SATA III data cables and try that???

Even at SATA 1 a DVD should read much faster than that. Are you sure it's not an issue with your HDD? It's possible that HDD write speeds are down for some reason.

Are you running too many processes perhaps? Are you trying to do other stuff while the disk loads? Have you disabled your antivirus? When was the last time you defragged? Have you cleaned the optical drive lately? You know, that thing with the special disk that you insert and somehow ends up cleaning the laser eye inside the drive. (When I was a kid I used to think it was magic lol) If it's nothing of the above and the drive is old then maybe it's finally dying.

Yeah, I'm sure. This thing loads up Windows faster than anything I've seen (matter of seconds from when I hit power on and Windows is up). Playing games, Fallout 3 for example, load times from entering different areas were SPLIT seconds. Less than a second. You would just see a quick blip that they gave hints on but could never read the hints. I know this is fast because my two nephews were here one time and they freaked out at how fast the load times were compared to theirs. This is a brand new, self built system. Summer of 2012. Haven't even had it more than 6 months yet.

Sometimes i have the same problem and it turns out to be the anti-virus program. I turned off the program and everything works like normal.

No, I meant the write speeds. Reading from an SSD is much faster than writing to it, which is what you're doing when installing a game. If you install from a downloaded source, is it quick? It may or may not be that, I'm just floating the idea.

Have you tried making an iso of the installation disk and installing it with daemon tools? Disabling antivirus?
Disabling cd emulation software such as daemon tools?

Hm. I suggest you to get rid of norton, it is a baaad antivirus, hell even Avast (which is free) is better! But that is not relevant.

Use this
http://www.imgburn.com/
to make an iso of your installation disk and then mount it with this http://www.daemon-tools.cc/eng/products/dtLite
to see if it installs any faster.

Hell, the imgburn thing would be more than enough to see if the low speed is a drive or mode issue, since a dvd should not take more than like 10 minutes to be copied to HDD.

I installed the GamersGate version a while back - I don't remember it taking more than 10 minutes, let alone 40. O.o

installed it from my old *ahem* torrent *ahem* that was still in my downloads, took 13 minutes.

I really need to delete that torrent now i own it legally

Ok, THANK YOU. Gonna give that a go.

But alas, as usual, when I'm trying to find and fix a problem, it seems that's inevitably when real life interupts, and it has again as I have to leave for awhile now.

THANKS TO ALL WHO ANSWERED. Hopefully, when I get back I can tackle this thing some more.

just a warning Two Worlds 2 isnt an easy game to like but if you get past the start it gets better, the expansion is pretty good though

Are you sure that your SATA controller is not running in Safe Mode "IDE compatible Mode".
AHCI mode may be more efficient but probably will need to reinstall the system.

NOTE Do not change this if the hard drive is set to work in RAID or using Windows XP.

This reminded me how Windows XP finished installing in my PC after a WHOLE night (and it happens with every OS installed from a disc). However, it loads movies and games fine. Strange....