MSI MS-8152 IDE CD-ROM - Page 1

- Introduction

As we have mentioned before, a CD-ROM drive is possibly not the best selling optical storage product, since the technology nowadays offers the essential reading feature in more complicated CD or DVD recorders or combo drives. However, there is a common though that the more complicated a device is the less accurate may be turned out, in specific areas, such as in the writing or reading accuracy. Can it be proven through testing? The MSI developed a new 52X CD-ROM drive, in order to fulfil our daily needs for accurate and fast reading for the CD format. Let's see the drive's performance.

- Drive features

The MSI MS-8152 is a 52X ATAPI CD-ROM drive. The current firmware revision installed is v1.12 and the supported cache buffer is 128 KB. Nero Info Tool reports that the drive doesn't support CD-Text, CD+G and C2 error report info.

- The package

The retail kit contains the drive itself, a quick installation guide, an IDE cable and mounting screws. MSI offers a one-year warranty for the 52X CD-ROM. The retail price of the drive is ~50 Euro, including tax.

The front panel of the drive includes the "MSI" and the "52X max" logos. The eject/stop and the fast/forward buttons are placed below the tray on the right side of the front panel, as usually. The operation LED indicates the drive status and is active while reading. Last, the available headphone jack and the volume control knob let you use the drive as a personal audio playback device.

On the rear panel there are the usual connectors, such as the DC input, the ATAPI interface, the device configuration jumper, and the analog/digital audio outputs.

After removing the screws on the bottom we can see the drive's internal design (click for high-res). We couldn't see the used chipsets since they are protected below a metal case, to protect them from impacts.

- Installation

The drive was identified as "ATAPI CD-ROM 52xMAX" under WinXP. The drive was installed to the secondary IDE channel of our test PC as a "Master" working in Ultra DMA Mode 2 transfer mode. The model came with firmware version v1.12 installed. For all the tests we used the latest versions of CloneCD, CDDAE, CDSpeed and EAC. We compare the performance with other 52X readers from TEAC, CyberDrive and Samsung.