I used Nero’s Infotool to check out this DVD+RW in more detail. As you can see it has a CD read speed of 40x, a write speed of 16x, and has a 2MB buffer size. The only type of media that this drive can’t read is the DVD-RAM which I have never used anyways. The drive will burn CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and has buffer underrun. It would be nice if all the boxes were checked however you would have to buy a multifunction DVD burner to get that.
I wanted to do some synthetic benchmarks so I loaded up Nero’s CD Speed v2.10 and started to test. The first thing I tested was a burned CD, the average read speed was 28.72x and the CPU usage was really low. The eject time was also pretty low at 1.65 seconds and then took 0.01 seconds to be recognized.
I then put in a pressed CD and reran the benchmark to get some comparison. The average read time for this CD was 28.36x and the CPU usage also was about the same as with the burned CD. Overall this pressed CD did not do as well as the burned CD did in the previous testing.
I also put in a single sided pressed DVD-ROM to do some testing, the average read speed was 7.55x. You can see at the end of testing things get a little crazy. The seek times and CPU usage are also exceptionally higher than all of the other testing done. This could either be because of the media, the particular DVD, or because the drive does not do well with DVD-ROM reading.
Finally I recorded a DVD+RW at 2.4x to see what kind of performance I would get. There was no problem writing at 2.4x, the process was very steady throughout the whole burning process. The entire session took just over 24 minutes and 4.38GB was written in that time period.
