Performance in CD Winbench 99

This is our good old CD Winbench 99. Traditionally, we used a printed CD and its copies on CD-R and CD-RW media.

The shape of the internal transfer graphs for all models indicates that all drives except Philips PBC03210G had problems with reading the printed CD. There are slumps at the end indicating that the drives couldn’t read up the data written in this zone and had to slow their speed down. Nevertheless, it was LG GCC04480B that scored the highest result in Winmark. However, the slowest result also belonged to an LG product, though to a different one.

LG GCC-4480B was again the fastest at reading the CD-R disk. Very close to it we can see LG GCC-4320B and Toshiba SD-R1312. In fact all drives performed more or less evenly in this test, only Samsung SM-348B was notably slower. Anyway, this drive scored a rather high Winmark rating, too.

The CD-RW disk proved to be a tough one for both models from Toshiba. They read the data noticeably slower than other drives. LG GCC-4320B fell behind, too, but not too much. And again it is LG GCC-4480B that grabbed the highest Winmark rating. Samsung SM-348B is the second, notching the maximum read speed on this medium along the way. LG GCC-4320B takes the third place.

As for the access time, LG GCC-4480B was the best track-finder on any type of media. We could put the other LG, GCC-4320B, on the second place considering its overall results. The slowest of all was Toshiba SD-R1202.

I believe, it is not quite correct to name a winner in terms of CPU resources utilization. Four drives showed identical results of a little over 1%. As for the losers, they were both Toshiba drives: 7%+ CPU workload may become inappropriate in some situations.

Summing up the CD Winmark 99 results, we would like to single out the LG GCC-4480B combo. It performed very well in all tests.

We would also like to make a remark about the Samsung drive. When attached to the farther connector on the IDE cable, it started aborting Winbench tests issuing various error messages from the very beginning. At first, it seemed like it was flawed and couldn’t work stably at all. But one of the messages about CRC errors made us suspicious. And we were right: after attaching the drive to the medium IDE-connector on the cable, we had no problems with the drive any more. So, it looks like the drive didn’t have enough signal power in the cable to work properly. It is obviously a flaw of this given model as all other tested drives were quite comfortable being attached to the farther connector of the cable and the cable itself was standard, no more than 18 inches long. So, if you are going to purchase this drive, pay attention to this problem: if errors appear, try connecting it to another connector of your IDE cable. It should help.