Nero’s InfoTool gives a lot of information of optical drives. From the main page of the program you can see all of the media that it supports which is everything but DVD-RAM. The drive has a 2MB buffer which is somewhat small but with Burn Proof it will be fine. Also showing is the CD-R write speed and the read speed capability, both of which are 40x.
Test Bed:
- Albatron K8X800 Pro II
- AMD Athlon64 3200+
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV HDD
- Corsair 1024MB PC3200 TwinX
- XFX GeForceFX 5700 Ultra
- Koolcase’s Panther
- Plextor 708A DVD burner
- SilenX 400w PSU
- Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu
Nero CD Speed 3.10 – pressed CD
This first test was done using a pressed Visual Studio .NET CD 1 which is 73:51 in length. The average read speed was 31.34x and does get up to 41.44x at the end. Seek times and CPU usage are good for the most part, however at 8x the CPU does spike to 43%!
Nero CD Speed 3.10 – burned CD
For the burned CD testing I used a Slackware 10 CD 1 ISO that I recently burned. The CD is 75:35 in length and was burned on a generic 80 minute CD-R from Target using Burnatonce software. The end read time does reach 41.97x which and has an average read speed of 30.93 both of which are impressive. You can see however that the reading does get a bit erratic and at one point does drop significantly. This could be due to the way the ISO was burned of the drive doing a poor job reading the media used.
Nero CD Speed 3.10 – CD DAE
DAE stands for Digital Audio Extraction which is drives capable speed of extracting audio from a CD. I used a Zondervan NIV audio bible CD that was 73:27 in length. As you can see the max read time does not reach the 40x that this drive is rated out however it does get a 10 for the quality and does use accurate stream.
Nero CD Speed 3.10 – DVD-ROM
For this test I used a pressed PC Gamer DVD-ROM that was 3.99GB in size. DVD reading was slower, on average 5.93x at the end reaching 7.89x. Seek times were also pretty low but peaked at full seek time. The CPU usage is also very heavy at 4x and 8x which reached 88% and I was using an Athlon 64 3200+.
Nero CD Speed 3.10 – DVD+R
For this test I used the 8x DVD+R that Plextor provided with the drive. I burned 4.37 GB worth of data of OCmodshop data that really needed to be backed up. The files ranged in size from a few KB to over 100MB. The read speeds and seek times were just a little faster than the pressed DVD-ROM while the CPU usage was quite lower, especially at 8x.
