52x CDRW Roundup - Page 14

RW Writing Tests

• Plextor Premium

The drive supports the 4X, 10X CLV with HS-RW media and 24X P-CAV and 32X US-RW rewriting speeds. With the current firmware (v1.01) the drive won't write at 32X even with the new 32X US-RW media (by Mitsubishi Chemicals). This “problem” will be solved with a newer firmware revision, as Plextor promised. The below graph shows the Nero CDSpeed writing graph with a MC 24x US-RW media.

As you can see from the CDSpeed writing simulation graph, Plextor Premium started writing at 23.88x but soon reached the 24x until the end of the writing task.

• Optorite CW5201

Optorite CW5201 supports 4X, 8X, 12X, 16X, 20X, 24X (CLV) and 32X(P-CAV) rewriting speeds. We used a 32X US-RW media (by Mitsubishi Chemicals) and burned it at 32x. The CDSpeed graph above shows the implementation of the P-CAV writing at 32X. The average writing speed is 30.71X.

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

As it was expected, the Optorite CW5201 is faster due to the 32x rewriting speed. The drive needed 3:10min to write 651MB of data.

Below you can see a screenshot from Nero Burning Rom after a successful writing at 24x.

Optorite CW5201 wrote the same amount of data at 32x, with Mitsubishi Chemicals US-RW media.

- Packet Writing Tests

We used Ahead InCD for the packet writing tests. The formatted disc had 534 MB of free space. We copied a 403 MB file (403.147 KB) from a Hard Disk (on the same PC as the writers) to the formatted RW media using Windows Explorer (we dragged and dropped). The following charts illustrated the results with 24X US-RW media.

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

The Optorite CW5201 write the file to the 32X US-RW disc at 27.6X average! The performance is the highest we ever had from a CD-RW recorder. The Plextor drive was slower (24x US-RW writing) with 20.51x.

- Mt. Rainier Tests

For testing the Mt. Rainier performance, we used was InCD 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.

Optorite CW5201 does not support the Mt rainier so we only tested the Premium drive. The performance with 24x US-RW discs was not very good and the drive wrote the file to the formatted disc at 7.98x average. Reading the file was also slower than expected (6.8x).