52X IDE CD-RW Recorder Roundup Vol 2 - Page 19

RW Writing Tests

• AOpen CRW5224

The drive officially supports the 4X, 10X 12X CAV with HS-RW media and 24X P-CAV US-RW rewriting speeds. However, the drive behaved as a CAV writer n our tests, as you can see below:

• Mitsumi CR-486ETE

The drive supports the 4X, 8X, 10X CLV, 12X,16X 20X and 24X CAV rewriting speeds.

• Teac CD-W552E

The drive supports the 4X, 8X, 10X CLV, 12X,16X and 24X CAV rewriting speeds.

• Waitec STORM 52/2

The drive supports the 4X, 10X CLV and 24X CAV rewriting speeds.

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

The fastest drive is the Mitsumi CR-487ETE with 211 seconds, followed by the Teac CD-W552E. The AOpen and Waitec drives are slower although they support the 24X US-RW speed. The reason is that these drives support the full CAV technology for 24X and not the faster P-CAV, implemented by Mitsumi and Teac.

In the following table you can see the recording times of the drives with HS-RW media.

- Packet Writing Tests

We used Ahead InCD v3.51.91 for the packet writing tests. 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. The following charts illustrated the results with 24X US-RW media.

This time the Teac drive gets the first place in the writing part with 14.87X. In the reading part the drive was not as fast as the AOpen and Waitec drives.

In the following table there are the packet writing results with HS-RW media

- Mt. Rainier Tests

For testing the Mt. Rainier performance, we used was InCD v3.51.91 by Ahead Software. After the format process, we immediately started the recording process (drag & drop). When the drive finished, we started the reading process back to the HD. The reading/writing performance of all the drives were lower than in the normal Packet writing mode.

- EasyWrite tests

The Philips Easy Write test checks the quality level of the Mt Rainier implementation. Although the drives accepted the EasyWrite test suite commands they didn't fulfill the basic PartA v1.60 tests, so we didn't proceed with the rest tests.