Performance in SiSoft Sandra Standard

The performance rating was measured on three types of media: a printed CD disk, a DVD-ROM disk and a DVD-RW disk. We used them all in the previous tests.

LG GCC-4480B and Samsung SM-348B worked with the CD-ROM disk the fastest of all. They prove their claimed high speeds leaving other combo-drives behind. While Philips PBC03210G appeared the slowest.

Samsung SM-348B is the best reading the DVD-ROM disks. Toshiba SD-R1202 takes the second place. Three other drives perform equally fast, while Philips PBC03210G is again noticeably slower than other testing participants..

The two combos from LG and the Samsung work best of all with the DVD-RW media. Toshiba SD-R1202 turned to be the worst here: it even “outperformed” the drive from Philips.

Performance in Nero InCD

We checked the ability of the drives to work in the packet mode:

The work with CD-RW in packet mode implied that we measured the time necessary to format a CD-RW disk, and checked how quickly the drive could write/read data on/from this disk. Samsung SM-348B and LG GCC-4480B were working with Verbatim DataLifePlus 24x disks with 650MB storage capacity. Other models were tested with 700MB Digitex 12x CD-RW disks. The read and write speeds shown in the table were calculated by dividing the amount of data by the time spent on these operations, because the disks used were of different storage capacity.

As we see, it takes LG GCC-4480B and Philips PBC03210G less time to format the disk than it takes other drives. As we have already said above, the LG drive has no official Mount Rainier support, but feels quite confident working with the CD-MRW format. For other models, which managed to pass this test, this parameter is much higher. It took Samsung SM-348B surprisingly too much time to format the disk, while the drives using the UDF format showed expectedly high formatting times. On the other hand, the Samsung drive was the fastest at reading and writing, having proven the speeds claimed in the official specs. It even outpaced another drive with the same 24x rewrite speed.

Philips PBC03210G was the slowest drive in the packet mode.

Performance in Nero Burning Rom

We burned a few CDs with the help of the Nero Burning Rom utility:

We used this popular program to measure how much time each combo-drive needs to write an MPEG-4 movie (632MB) to Verbatim 24x and Digitex 12x disks.

The results could be analyzed according to the write speed ranges of the testing participants. LG GCC-4480B was faster than the other 24x drive – Samsung SM-348B. Among 10x drives, the Toshibas were faster.