That was my experience (shared by all windows users) who suddenly found problems playing DVD videos due to the optical disk drive transfer mode dropping into PIO mode, seemingly "Out of the Blue", for no obvious reason and remaining in that mode even after a reboot.
It required the user to take remedial measures to restore it back to a UDMA mode (typically modes 1 or 2 in the case of a DVD drive, rarely, if ever, modes 3 and above, which was the preserve of the later models of hard disk drive).
Of course, SATA has largely eliminated this problem since it can distinguish between media and interface errors (and even allow hot swapping a SATA interface cable without crashing the drive interface - a luxury not provided for with IDE). SATA isn't going to try to remedy media issues by futilely slowing down the interface.