Testbed and Methods

As Sony DRU-500A combines the feature of several devices, we tried to review all its features as a whole.

We used the following software to test numerous feature of the today’s hero:

• Nero Info Tool ver.1.03.2;
• CD Winbench 99 ver.1.1.1;
• Nero CD Speed ver.1.02;
• Nero CD DAE ver.0.4B;
• Nero DVD Speed ver.0.53B;
• CDRom Drive Analizer ver.2.32;
• SiSoftware Sandra Professional 2003.

Besides, we copied a DVD-movie disk on different types of media and burned backup information by means of VERITAS RecordNow and VERITAS Simple Backup and measured the time spent on this. The benchmarked drive was connected to the second IDE channel as “Master” and worked in UDMA/33 mode.

We used the following testbed:

• Athlon 700MHz CPU;
• Elitegroup K7S5A mainboard;
• 128MB SDRAM;
• ATI RADEON 8500 64MB graphics card;
• IBM DTLA 307015 15GB UDMA/5 HDD;
• Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and DirectX 9.0 installed.

Performance

Nero Info Tool

This informational utility shows all the features of the drive it could find. Among them, the support of nearly all DVD media types. The only exception, DVD-RAM, is rather an obsolete thing today. Music lovers will surely appreciate the support of CD Text, CD+G, C2 Errors that allow creating quality copies of audio disks. An empty buffer is not a crucial thing anymore: Buffer Underrun Protection will take care of it. The new standard, Mount Rainier, is not supported, but you can somewhat make up for the lack of this feature with the help of a special utility that allows working with a DVD disk like with a big diskette. You can find a link to this program on the CD with the software bundle. The last thing to be mentioned is that the drive has regional protection. The model we had at our disposal was intended for use in the fifth zone.

CD WinBench 99

• CD-ROM
• CD-R
• CD-RW

We ran this classical benchmark testing the drive performance with the CD media three times. First, we used a CD-ROM disk itself, and then the copies of this disk made on CD-R and CD-RW disks. The read graphs of the three disks look similar except a significant drop at the end, which you can see on the graph for the licensed CD-ROM. Maybe, not very high-quality mounting told on the drive’s ability to read data from the media. Anyway, this didn’t allow the drive to work as fast with this disk as it did with the other two disks. All in all, the final score of the CD-ROM Winmark benchmark appeared about three times lower.