Ricoh MP9200A IDE DVD/CDR-W - Page 8

DVD Tests

- Test Method

We used Nero DVD Speed v0.52 to run DVD tests (DMA enabled on all drives). All tests were performed at least 3 times with the same DVD title (we took the worst results). The DVD Speed author suggests avoiding the use of dual layer DVDs since performance might be lower than the actual one. For that purpose we used a single-layered DVD title, taken from PC Magazine.

For comparison reasons with actual DVD-ROM drives, we used the results from our previous Ricoh MP9120 (8x DVD), CyberDrive DM126D (12x DVD) and Pioneer DVD-105S (16x DVD) tests.

- Nero DVD Speed results

The Ricoh MP9200A is really a great performer in the Nero DVD Speed test. The drive managed to reach an 11836 average reading speed, which outperforms both Ricoh 9120 and CyberDrive DM126D. The Pioneer DVD-105S is the absolute winner, since it reached around 15Mb/s!

For the seek times, the Ricoh 9200 seems to have the biggest among the 4 tested drives. The previous model, Ricoh MP9120, reaches 100ms and real DVD-ROMs have much lower seek times (less than 90ms).

- DVD Ripping Tests

We measured the DVD Ripping speed using Matrix DVD and DVD Decoder v0.2. The Ricoh MP9200 performed quite well but could not threaten CyberDrive and Pioneer drives:

- Movie Tests

We tested the Ricoh MP9200A with many DVDs and our overall impression was very good. The drive seems to work much better than the MP9120A and didn't produce any problems during playback. When playing DVD movies, the average CPU Usage was 45% using PowerDVD v3.0 Build 0421. We noticed no problems during DVD playback, no matter what tricks we tried! The older MP9210A had numerous DVD playback problems, which seem to have been solved in the newer MP9200 series...