TEAC 540E CD-ROM

Review Pages

1. Installation
2. Data Tests (Pressed CDs)
3. Data Tests (74min CDs)
4. Data Tests (80min and RW CDs)
5. DAE Tests (Audio pressed CDs)
6. Conclusion

Teac 540E IDE CD-Rom- Page 6

Conclusion

Positive (+) :	Negative (-) :
- Great Data performance with all CDs - Great DAE performance with all CDs - Blazing RW reading speeds - Great seek times - Low CPU usage - Digital Output - Low price - MMC DAO RAW read support (CloneCD compatible)	- Weak CloneCD performance!

The Teac 540E is a very good IDE CD-Rom drive. It performed very well with pressed and CD media in all of our tests. It had possibly the fastest reading speed when using RW media (30.38x average reading speed). The DAE reading speeds are very good for an IDE CD-ROM and managed to outperform even the Plextor 40x CD-Rom. In addition the drive seek time is very low (60ms) which is usefull when reading CDs with a lot of small files. The combination of performance, DAE speed and media compatibility combined with a very low price = killer combo!

Additional Information:
The weakest point of the drive appears to be the disappointing CloneCD compatibility since it cannot read a protected CD (with lots of errors) very fast. CloneCD users will not be pleased about this, but again nothing is this life is perfect ;) The Teac 540E is capable of reading MMC DAO RAW (CloneCD compatible) but as the CloneCD author posted: "..Setting read speed doesn't work and it is very slow skipping read errors.."