52x Roundup Vol. 1 - Page 8

RW Writing Tests

Both SONY and the AOpen drive support the new 24X US-RW (CAV) recording technology. At that US-RW format, the SONY drive supports 10X (CLV), 16X (CLV?) and 24X (CAV) while the AOpen only 24X (CAV) writing speeds (even specs mention 16X CAV also). The Plextor PX-W4824A and YAMAHA CRW-F1E support 24X (P-CAV) and have higher average writing speeds.

With HS-RW media, the Sony CRX-220E1 supports 4X, 8X, 10X and 12X CLV, while the AOpen CRW5224 4X, 10X and 12X CLV re-writing speeds.

For the burning tests, we burned a full 74mins disc with all the drives. The results are showed in the following chart, in the maximum supported speed for each drive.

The faster re-writer comes from YAMAHA with only 221secs. The PleXWriter PX-W4824A follows with 224secs; the AOpen CRW5224 comes third with 290secs and the SONY CRX-220E1 last with 305secs. In comparison with a HS-RW 12X re-writer (SONY CRX-210E1) that needs 401secs to end the same task, we can see major performance difference, especially with the Plextor and Yamaha drives.

Under HS-RW media, we had the following results:

- 24X US-RW writing results

- Packet Writing Tests

We used Ahead InCD v3.5.16 for the packet writing tests. The new design of InCD seems interesting:

The formatted disc had 534 MB of free space. We copied a 403 MB file (403.147 kbs) from a Hard Disk (on the same PC as the writers) to the formatted RW media using Windows Explorer (we dragged and dropped) and we completed the test more than once, to eliminate any possible time measurement faults and user errors.

As was expected the YAMAHA and Plextor drive leads the packet writing tests. The AOpen drive comes third and the SONY drive forth at the writing part. At the reading part, there is a change since the AOpen and SONY drives get the first two places. With HS-RW media, the AOpen is faster than the Sony drive as the following results show: