CDR Tests

The Acer CRW1208A is the first drive, which supports "SeamLess Link" anti-coaster technology. We used the CD Speed 99 build-in writing speed test and confirmed the 12x writing speed - 12.00x average (check left picture).

-Procedure:
We tested the Acer CRW1208A with Nero v5.0.4.8, CloneCD v2.8.4.3, Padus DJ v3.00.800 software and with the following media: Princo 74min (16x) & 80min (16x), Platinum 80min (12x), Verbatim 74min (16x) & 80min (16x), Mitsui 74min (16x), Prodisc 80min (16x)(red bottom) and with Ricoh/Plextor/Verbatim 74min HS RW. We noticed that the drive had problem recognizing both 90 and 99 minutes CDs.

- CD-R Tests:
We created "DataCD" job with data slight higher than 74mins (74:03:65). We burned the same job with all 4 CDR-W drives:

As you can see, there are differences between the 4 tested drives. The Acer CRW1208A gave back a satisfactory recording time among the 4 CDR-W drives. The PleXWriter PX-W120A has the biggest (416) and both Ricoh drive hold the first 2 places. The interesting part here is the increased CPU usage over the competition. 28% for 12x writing is a LOT so that caused us many questions since all previous tested drives had much lower CPU usage. We also tried the same test in Win2k but the results were the same.

- 80min CDs:
As with the previous test, we created a DataCD (80:02:16) and used the same media for all burns:

The Acer 1208A has the biggest time with 445secs. The Ricoh based drives gave the lower burning time in this test. The later one is 1 sec ahead while the other drives (Ricoh MP7120A & Plextor PX-W1210A) are following with 2 and 6 secs behind.

- Overburning Tests:
We used 90 and 99min CDs (from Medea International and Copy4All) but the Acer CRW1208A denied recognizing both CDR media.

- CloneCD Tests:
The Acer CRW1208A is probably the fastest CDR-W drive that can backup all current protected CDs (including SD2). The drive supports DAO-RAW only as you can see in the left picture and the "BURN Proof/JustLink" is enabled by default.

According to the CloneCD the drive supports "DAO-RAW" but not "CD+G DAO-RAW":

Update: Tthe latest version of Clone CD v 2.5.8.1 already be confirmed that fix the DAO96 RAW Writing issue with Acer 1208a, this version already allow Acer writer to copy Diable2 successful and play it fine ( in the earlier version of Clone CD can copy Diable2 with 1208a successful, but the backup disc can't play successful ).

SD2 report:
For the SD2 tests we used the "No One Lives For Ever" CD title. We used the Acer CRW1208A both as reader/writer. The results were the best you can find around. The produced backup worked in:

From our tests, the Acer CRW1208A can backup 100% SD2 protected CDs. Currently it is the only 12x CDR-W drive that have this feature, which makes it unique to the competition.

- Buffer Underrun tests:
The Acer CRW1208A supports "SeamLess Link" anti-coaster technology. The "SeamLess Link" anti-coaster technology supposed to work with all current (and old) CDR software since all the work done automatically from the drive. In order to test this claim we used "FireBurner v1.06" and tried to burn an image pressing at the same time "ctrl+alt+del", in order to freeze the PC and cause a Buffer Underrun. All our attempts didn't caused any problem to both FireBurner/Acer and the task completed ok. Notice that FireBurner v1.06 supports neither "BURN-Proof" nor "JustLink". For making that our test was valid we tried the same procedure at Yamaha 2100E (with FireBurner). When we caused "Buffer-Underrun" the Yamaha 2100E CDR-W drive simply stopped working.

Verdict of CDR Results:
The Acer CRW1208A worked good in most of our tests. It worked satisfactory with most CDR media, had some problems with 90 and 99min CDs, and the writing times were in what the competition offers. The most negative issue was the unexplained high CPU usage (28%) for the 12x writing speed.

CloneCD users will love this drive since it supports DAO-RAW and is the fastest CDR-W which can backup 100% SD2 protected CDs. The "SeamLess Link" anti-coaster technology seems working fine with older CDR software, which for example "BURN-Proof" or "JustLink" doesn't...