Testbed and Methods

At first, we tried to follow the usual strategy for standard optical drive testing. Unfortunately, we couldn’t follow it exactly: some programs just don’t see a device connected via USB, and others can’t recognize it. That’s why the list of our benchmarks is a bit short today.

The following informational utilities were used to check the functionality of the drive:

• Nero Info Tool ver1.03.2;
• CDIdentifier 1.0.0.3.

The speed characteristics of the drive were tested using:

• CD WinBench 99 ver. 1.1.1;
• Nero CD Speed ver.1.02e;
• Nero InCD 3.5.2.40;
• CDRom Drive Analyzer ver.2.32;
• Sandra Standard 2003 3.9.44.

We ran the benchmarks on 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.

The drive was connected to the computer via a USB 2.0 / IEEE1394 PCI controller made on NEC 720100 / Agere FW322 chips.

Performance

Informational Utilities

Nero Info Tool shows that the drive supports all compact disk formats: CD Text, CD+G, C2 Errors and so on. At the same time, this program fails to find if the drive can read any DVD-disks except DVD-ROM. That’s just another proof you shouldn’t rely on test programs that much. The device supports regional protection scheme and comes without any specific zone set up.

Yeah, seems like the drive keeps silent about its own DVD-reading capabilities. CD/DVD Capabilities Viewer also failed to see anything except DVD-ROM reading. Our tests will show that both utilities were wrong.

CD WinBench 99

The tests from the classic benchmark set by Ziff Davis went smoothly. Besides a printed disk we used two copies of it made on CD-R and CD-RW media.

• CD-ROM
• CD-R
• CD-RW

The read graphs have nearly perfect shape: there are no slumps and the transfer rate is steadily increasing to the outer edge of the disk. We should note, though, that CD-RW reading is performed twice as slow.

The numbers correspond to what we see in the graphs. WinMark ratings for the printed CD and its CD-R clone are nearly the same. The performance dropped by a third on the CD-RW. Access time is minimal on the CD-ROM, higher on the CD-R and maximum on the CD-RW. The CPU utilization coefficient, as we have expected, is higher than what standard internal drives usually show.