CD-ROM

CD-R

CD-RW

CD-DA

Nero CD Speed helped us evaluate all the general characteristics of the drive. We used four types of most frequently used media. They were: a printed CD (coming with a computer magazine), CD-R and CD-RW disks with data, burned by the program itself, and an AudioCD.

Again, the read graphs have nearly perfect shape: no slumps or juts. MPD-AP20U proves true to its specifications on CD-ROM and CD-RW disks showing 24x speed. It performs nearly twice as slow with the CD-DA and CD-RW.

The seek time reaches the maximum on CD-RW media. The CPU utilization becomes 100% with the CD-RW and CD-DA disks at 8x speed, maybe because the performance is close to the theoretical maximum for these disk types.

The data-transfer rate via the interface is gets twice as low as we shift to audio CDs. The zero load time as measured by the program can be explained by the fact that this operation is performed in this model manually and thus the time cannot be correctly measured by the software, like we usually do for ordinary internal CD-drives.

The last thing to pay attention to is the recognition time: it takes twice as much time to recognize a recordable disk than the printed ones require.