FREECOM Fx-50 DVD+/-RW - Page 4

DVD reading tests

- Single Layer DVD-ROM (Click for CDSpeed results)

All three drives support 12x maximum reading speed and use CAV reading strategy for the single layer DVD-Rom. It is therefore not surprising that the performance from all three drives was similar with the 820A Abex test DVD-ROM. The reported average reading speed of each drives is about 9.3x

The seek times for the Freecom and LiteOn dirves are similar for single layer DVD-Rom, while the results for Mitsumi are slightly higher.

- Dual Layer PTP DVD-ROM (Click for CDSpeed results)

The two layers of a PTP DVD-ROM disc are read sequentially with the drive starting the read process from the inner tracks on the disc, which is the beginning of each layer, and progressing outwards towards to the outer tracks for each layer.

The dual layer PTP DVD-Rom was read steadily, under CAV mode from Freecom RW8J, and the test ended with very acceptable results. The reading process started at 3.53x and at the end of each layer reached 8.34x. On this test the Mitsumi drive returned the slowest results.

The above graph shows that the seek times for the Freecom drive are very fast although not the fastest in this comparison. The LiteOn drive was the fastest while the Freecom drive needed 91ms for Random seek and 173ms for Full seek. The Mitsumi drive had the slowest seek times.

- Dual Layer OTP DVD-ROM

The first layer of an OTP dual layer DVD-ROM is read exactly the same way as the first layer of the PTP disc we tested previously. The difference here is the reading strategy of the second layer on the disc. The beginning of the second layer is located in the outer part of the disc, so the drive starts reading from the outer tracks inwards towards the inner tracks of the disc.

All tested media up to now was read under CAV mode by the Freecom RW8J drive, and the OTP DVD-ROM was no exception. The screenshot below shows that the drive momentarily had to slow down speed at the end of the first layer when switching over to the second layer, while the screenshot on the left, shows low seek times and a good average speed.

- DVD Ripping Tests

We measured the DVD-Video ripping speed for the Freecom drive using the latest version of DVD Decrypter. The DVD Video title is the "Matrix" pressed DVD-Video.

DVD Decrypter reported that in order to use the Freecom RW8J for ripping, we hade to set the region, and so we used Region 2. We ripped the movie on the DVD-ROM to our hard disk. The above graph shows that Freecom and LiteOn finished the process faster than Mitsumi. According to DVD Decrypter, Freecom needed 12:53 minutes to finish the test resulting in an average speed of 6.6x

- DVD Recordable / Rewritable reading Tests

The chart below shows the Nero CDSpeed average reading speed results with the following media:

• 8x DVD+R
• 4x DVD+RW

• 4x DVD-R
• 2x DVD-RW

The above graphs shows the average reading speed of the three drives with all four media types, both writable and rewritable. The end speed for the Freecom drive was slower than the manufacturers specifications for 8x maximum reading speed and its average speed was restricted to 4.65x for both DVD-R and DVD+R. LiteOn showed similar performance to the Freecom drive while the Mitsumi returned the fastest speed.

With the rewritable media, the Freecom drive returned the fastest reading speed with DVD+RW media, while the DVD-RW media was read at exactly the same speed with all drives.