by Andrey Kuznetcov
06/03/2003 | 11:57 PM
External optical drives occupy a special place among the CD/DVD-ROM devices. They offer mobility, which is one of the values of our today’s life. There are not too many models like that in the market yet. On the other hand, they are not rarities and their number is on the rise rather than otherwise. Although, not every external optical drive can be called compact and light enough to carry around with you.
<%BANNER[article]%>We wonder if it is possible to design a really miniature CD-RW drive, capable of working with the entire range of standard disks? Sony came up with a solution: here is a really small optical combo-drive supporting the whole range of disk standards and offering wide functionality. It is Sony MPD-AP20U.
Let us introduce this exciting product to you now!
Interface | Hi-Speed USB (USB 2.0) |
Buffer size | 8MB |
CD-ROM/DVD-ROM read speed | 24x/8x |
CD-r/CD-RW write speed | 24x/10x |
Average access time | 160ms |
Supported disk formats | DVD-ROM |
Write methods | Track-at-once |
Memory Stick (read/write speed) | 1.5/2.45 MB/s |
CD-DA/MP3 disc/DVD-Video read speed in autonomous mode | 4/10/1.5 hours |
CD-R/CD-RW write speed in autonomous mode | 9/8 discs |
Time required to completely charge the internal battery | 4 hours |
Power consumption (on charging/no charging) | 10W/7.5W |
Dimensions | 136.4x22x159mm |
Weight | 300g |
You can learn about all the advantages of MPD-AP20U from the package, without taking the device out. So, we’ve got one more combo-thing: it understands compact disks as well as DVD media. Of course, the read speeds don’t reach the highest peaks in the industry, but that’s not so important for a portable drive: CD read speed equals 24x, DVD read speed – 8x, CD-R write speed – up to 24x, CD-RW write speed – up to 10x. The model features Power-Burn technology, which is nothing else but a variation of the well-known Buffer Underrun Error Protection technology.
The next thing worth mentioning is that Sony follows its own course of supporting both competitive DVD media standards, those with the minus and plus signs. People who watch high-quality DVD movies often will surely appreciate this feature, as it will save them time and trouble when they borrow disks from someone, because there will be no need to worry whether the disk is “the right one”.
Besides being an optical combo-drive, Sony MPD-AP20U reads Memory Stick cards, too. Memory Stick is Sony’s favorite pet, used in many of the company’s devices. Although other manufacturers are not very enthusiastic about this media type, the available Memory Stick slot is a definite advantage, as it will simplify the data exchange with the PC, if there are other Sony devices installed there.
One more specialty of MPD-AP20U is its multimedia capabilities. For example, it can be used as an MP3-player. The package of the drive includes all the necessary accessories. As for supported audio files, they are CD-DA tracks, MP3 and WAV-files (the latter two can be read from a Memory Stick card, too). M3u play-lists are also supported.
We would also like to draw your attention to the Cradle stand coming with the device, which helps to connect it to the computer. We see cradles like that in PDAs and notebooks, and we are really glad Sony borrowed this idea for its drive.
The last, but one of the most important things about this device is its true mobility. It is achieved not only due to small size, but also due to universal power supply circuit. MPD-AP20U can get power from AC power source (like most external drives do), but also from its own accumulator battery, or use power elements installed in the cradle. The two latter options help to increase the time of autonomous work considerably.
The USB 2.0 (Hi-Speed) interface has become the mainstream thing in today’s devices. The 60MB/s bandwidth is quite enough for the Sony drive. Of course, you can use USB 1.1, too, but the lower bandwidth may negatively impact the performance of the device. For example, you can get unstable picture when watching DVD-movies via USB 1.1.
MPD-AP20U features an 8MB buffer (some internal models have less!) to maintain stable data transfer at a high speed.
No doubt that those of you who met Sony CD Walkman will find MPD-AP20U very similar. They do really look similar. They both have nearly the same dimensions as they work with full-size (12 cm) compact disks. The device has a metal gray case with bluish glimmer and black plastic parts. There is some info about the model on the round cover; a small window shows the rotating disk inside. To the left of the window, there is a spot you should press on to close the cover. The controls are placed on the black panel at the front. The Lock slider blocks the neighboring keys: Sound (selects one of seven different sound modes) and Eject (take a guess what this is for?). There is also a LED indicating the work mode of the device and the PC connector. The Memory Stick slot and its own LED are on the right side of the case. The left side carries USB and power connectors and a composite input for the remote control and headphones.
At the bottom of the case there is a cradle connector and a switch to open the cover when the device is turned off. Inside the case there is a lithium-ion accumulator battery, which is automatically charged when you connect the device to an AC power source.
The black cradle makes the handling of the device easier. You can connect the cradle to the PC and plug the combo-drive into it ever after. The cradle has a USB cable tail, a power connector and a button to eject the drive. The drive sits in the cradle quite tight thanks to the tip-up brace.
The cradle can be powered by eight AA batteries, thus making the drive work longer autonomously. However, you can’t recharge these batteries when plugging the cradle into AC power. You will have to use a special battery charger for this, which is not included with the drive.
The remote control for the MP3-player incarnation of the drive looks like the ones used in the Walkman/CD products. Its size is close to that of a cigarette or short pen. A small LCD display tells you the battery status and some basic info on sound tracks or music files played.
Buttons for controlling the device when it becomes an MP3-player are placed above the display. They are:
Below the display, there is a Hold switch, which locks the above-listed buttons. There is also a socket to connect the headphones to. The most interesting thing in the remote control is the knob. It is a rotating part of the unit’s case. It can be shifted to different positions. Combined with the button on the end, this gives us a flexible control of the playback and sound volume.
The accessories coming with MPD-AP20U make it even more mobile: plug and play, there is no need to search for any additional thingies or software. The package includes the cradle, USB cable, remote control unit, power supply adapter, power cable, four ferrite clips, headphones, and two CDs with software (for Macintosh and Windows). Those ferrite clips are put on the ends of cables to reduce electro-magnetic noise. The software bundle deserves a closer look. Let’s do it.
This is a backup utility. You can use it to write data to a CD as well as other storage devices. The backup process can be made automatic by writing special scripts.
This software piece is an analogue of Nero Burning Rom. It can burn and copy disks.
It’s a utility for formatting CD-RW disks in the UDF format and burning them in the packet mode. Its interface and capabilities resemble those of another popular utility – Nero InCD.
This multimedia player can play audio files and write them on CDs. Moreover, it helps to create sound files and listen to Internet radio.
Serves to create and organize digital photo-albums. Besides, it also offers a number of interesting features, such as slide shows, WEB-albums, video-postcards and more.
This utility is for image editing. It’s installed together with ArcSoft PhotoBase.
DVD fans don’t need any introductions of the PowerDVD utility. For those who are not familiar with it we would like to say that PowerDVD is one of the most popular DVD-players.
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:
The speed characteristics of the drive were tested using:
We ran the benchmarks on the following testbed:
The drive was connected to the computer via a USB 2.0 / IEEE1394 PCI controller made on NEC 720100 / Agere FW322 chips.
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.
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.
Drive | CD-ROM WinMark, | Read speed | Access time, | CPU Utilization, |
CD | 1330 | 1730/3690 | 135 | 6.36 |
CD-R | 1300 | 1850/3560 | 140 | 6.25 |
CD-RW | 854 | 929/1800 | 155 | 4.47 |
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.
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.
This test checks how well the sound tracks can be extracted from a pre-recorded disk with 100% certainty. The “on-the-fly” copying is not too fast, though, it occurs at 4x only. The drive couldn’t read the data from Leadin and Subchannel. The positioning precision of the drive is not very high. Thus, it suits well for work with audio CDs, but you can’t hope for any super-precise results.
What can you expect from a drive if the disk surface is damaged? Quality Check test will help to answer this question. Here we used a specially prepared CD with the damaged surface. You see the illustrative results in the screenshot. You realize that no positive outcome is possible in case of scratched disks or any other surface artifacts. More than three million errors are a way too much to give you even the tiniest hope for success when reading disks like that.
CD-ROM
CD-R
CD-RW
This is a simple program developed by one our Russian colleague, which we used to recheck the results of Nero CD Speed. The read speeds on a printed CD, CD-R and CD-RW were close to what we saw above. The drive shows the claimed speed on the CD-ROM and CD-R and slows down in case of CD-RW.
DVD-ROM
DVD-RW
DVD+RW
This benchmark shows how well the drive handles DVD disks. Again, we used three disks: a DVD-ROM with a movie, and its copies on a DVD-RW and DVD+RW. Although the drive didn’t finish the test with the last disk type, we see that it reads all of them with about the same speed, without any distinctions. The numbers for the two passed tests are practically the same.
CD-ROM | DVD-ROM | DVD-RW | DVD+RW |
1850KB/s | 1827KB/s | 1833KB/s | 1832KB/s |
Sandra tried to single out the disk format the drive processes fast of all. A standard printed CD proved best here. A little behind and close to each other follow a DVD-ROM, DVD-RW and DVD+RW disks.
Formatting time, min:sec | Read speed, MB/s | Write speed, MB/s |
17:33 | 1.17 | 1.24 |
The ability of the drive to work in the packet mode was checked by means of Nero InCD. We measured the time required to make a Digitex CD-RW ready to work, namely to format it to the UDF format. As we have expected, it took the drive a bit too long: over 17 minutes. Besides, we wrote a few files (total size of 543MB) onto the test disk and copied them back to the HDD. We calculated the speeds of these two operations; they are listed in the table and are nearly equal.
Sony MPD-AP20U can burn a CD-RW at an up to 10x speed. We checked this out on the same Digitex disk by writing an MPEG-4 movie (692MB big) with the help of the popular Nero Burning ROM utility. The whole procedure took 8 minutes 38 seconds.
So, our brief walk with the external portable drive from Sony comes to an end. The model will surely become very popular due to its pretty exclusive position in the market, its true mobility and wide functionality. We only have to emphasize a few highs and lows in our final words.
Highs:
Lows:
