It's a known fact that Windows times out commands after 7 seconds, so
drives generally try and respond if they can before that happens. We
default to 5 seconds, which sometimes is a bit too short.
Jeremy Higdon reported here:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/1/1/145
that his drive takes longer than 5 seconds for a "read track
information" command, later confirming that it is about 6.7 seconds.
So just do the sane thing and change the default command timeout to 7
seconds to avoid other surprises.