SONY BW-RU101 PDD - Page 9

- Testing

For testing the Sony BW-RU101, we used WinBench 99 and HD Tach 3.0.1.0 benchmarking software, mostly with PDDRW media. First, lets see the CLV and CAV reading modes. WinBench 99 showed that the reading performance of the PDDRW23 was around 11MB/sec, CLV reading mode confirmed:

When forced into CAV reading/writing (switch 2 at 1 position), the drive started reading at 4.8MB/sec and ends at 11MB/sec, full CAV reading for the BW-RU101 as per the specs:

Then we fired up, HD Tach 3.0.1.0. The software can perform three types of reading tests:

• quick
• long
• full

Below we can see the table with all the test results for the CLV/CAV modes:

The results from HD Tach are interesting. Again, the superb reading performance of the BW-RU101 was confirmed, 10.7MB/sec for CLV and 8.0MB/sec for CAV reading modes. However, what wasn't confirmed was the writing performance. Sony promises up to 9MB/sec, which however, didn't show up in our test results. After reading the drive manual again, was noticed something interesting:

"...Inhibit Verify: Using a physical formatted disc, is highly recommended if you inhibit verify for writes. Although disable verify for writes quickens the write transfer rate, it may reduce the reliability of written data. Even if you inhibit verify for writes, if the disc is not physical formatted, the drive forces verify for all write operations..."

What this means is that if the "Inhibit Verify" switch is off, every write operation will be accompanied by a verify. This is probably why the writing speed was half of what is given in the specifications. This is very similar to what occurs with DVD-RAM media. So we enabled "Inhibit Verify", but again the writing performance was more or less as before.