Hdparm can be used to view or set many hardware characteristics of IDE or SATA drives including optical drives (and even some SCSI drives).  For example, the read-lookahead feature can be enabled or disabled.  Also of interest is that the on board write caching can be disabled.  This may or may not be of use when trying to optimize the writing of data to the drive especially when the operating system and/or file system itself may also perform write caching.

Some options of hdparm are dangerous and are generally listed as such in the man page.

Hdparm is available from SourceForge and there is even a version for Windows.