Performance in CDRom Drive Analyzer

The CDRom Drive Analyzer utility was run on three types of media: a printed CD (enclosed with a computer magazine), CD-R and CD-RW disks with the data created by Nero CD Speed.

The graphs don’t require too many comments of ours. Still, there are a few moments to be discussed. LG GCC-4320B gave out a speed boost on the CD-R and even got beyond the nominal limit of 40x. Philips PBC03210G looks good, too: 52x and 44x on “full-size” CD-R and CD-RW disks, respectively, although its official limit is 40x. Samsung SM-348B works equally well with both CD-R and CD-RW. Toshiba SD-R1202 somehow slumps just starting to read the CD-R disk, but eventually shows higher maximum speed than specified (also on the printed CD that carries less than 700MB of data). On the other hand, it flunks the test on the CD-RW showing only 25x speed. The other Toshiba drive behaves similarly: faster than promised on the CD-ROM and CD-R, but slower on the CD-RW.

Performance in CDVD Benchmark

The CD Benchmark program from German developers is multi-functional and, unlike other utilities, supports nearly all types of media available, including DVD disks. Of course, we used it in our tests. We took the four disks we used in Nero CD Speed (basic) tests, a licensed DVD disk and its copy made on a DVD-RW TDK 4.7GB.

Each screenshot has two windows. The left window displays a yellow (white) line indicating the read speed and a green line standing for the spindle rotation speed. The right window displays the access time diagram: yellow dots stand for random access, while red dots indicate full stroke access. Below are the numerical results of the graphics representation, all in German of course, but you will have no problem understanding what the whole thing is about. For each drive you can see the read speeds (average, in the beginning and in the end) given in “X” and in KB/s. Besides, they also mention the working speed range of the given drive, the CPU utilization, access times, burst data transfer rate. When audio CDs are tested, there is also some info about the drive’s ability to use “Accurate Stream” and “C2 error” pointers.

You can see all results in the diagrams, so we will only dwell upon the drives work with DVD media.

LG GCC-4480B drive slows down its read speed by 25% on transition from DVD-ROM to DVD-RW. The same happens to the other LG model – GCC-4320B. Philips PBC03210G is reading both DVDs at about 4x speed. Samsung SM-348B is brisk on the first half of the race and shows 11.5x on the DVD-ROM, but then the speed goes down and the drive ends much poorer. When reading DVD-RW, the speed doesn’t go beyond 6x, but the drive maintains it throughout the disk.

Toshiba SD-R1202 reads the audio disk with the stable linear speed of a little below 16x. It also produces a jagged transfer line for the CD-R and low read speed for the CD-RW. It stands to the claimed specs on the DVD-ROM, reading it at 12x. On the DVD-RW, however, this speed goes halfway down and the transfer line has a lot of peaks and slumps. The other Toshiba, SD-R1312, behaved very similarly. It had no evident slumps in the graphs, but its DVD-ROM reading speed was just a little above 8x and dropped 1.5 times down on the DVD-RW.