Error 51: An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0...

[McC]

...during a paging operation.

This has been happening to me a great deal lately, and I'm not sure how to diagnose it. It only seems to occur when I start playing a DVD, but once it occurs, the DVD playback isn't particularly good (it goes from being a 4-8x device to a 1.4x device rather quickly, suggesting it kicks out of DMA mode and into PIO mode). Once this occurs, it also affects DVD burning performance (if I try to burn at 4x, it fails). I know how to fix the problem to get burning to work (going into RegEdit and clearing out the primary/secondar IDE channel error checksums, then rebooting), but the fact is that I can't watch DVDs with any degree of satisfaction at the current state. I also suspect it affects CD/DVD-based game performance.

The drive is a Sony DL DVD burner.

EDIT: Despite what I suspect, Windows continues to display the access mode of the secondary IDE channel as Ultra DMA. However, it is not performing like UDMA, so I think there might be some kind of hidden Windows setting that gets enabled after the aforementioned error occurs to prevent UDMA access.

Any ideas?