I used Nero’s Infotool to check out this CDRW in detail. As you can see it has a read speed of 40x, a write speed of 40x, and is tray loading. The firmware revision is 1.02 which is the newest one available from Plextor. The drive was made on 5/10/02 and uses a 4MB buffer. It is able to read CD-Rs, CD-RWs, Video CDs, CD Text, CD+G, and C2 errors. It is able to write to CD-Rs, CD-RWs, and has Buffer under run protection (BURN-proof)
I wanted to do some synthetic benchmarks so I loaded up Nero’s CD Speed v 1.0 and started to test. I first put in a generic CD-R and ran the benchmark. The average read time for this disk was around 32x and maxed out at 42.53x. You can see that the seek times at random was 117 ms and the full seek time was 211 ms, the full seek time was a little high but not unbearable.
I then went ahead and ran the burn simulation in the Nero CD speed. Because of PowerRec II the drive would not burn this CD-R faster than 32x because this CD was not in the drives database as 40x compatible. Unfortunately I used the 40x CD-R that came with the drive on another test that I ran and did not have any others. We will see in the real world testing later that you don’t need 40x media to burn at 40x.
Finally I used Nero CD Speed to do the write test on a CD-RW disk. The drive was able to burn at 12x the entire time and did not step up in speeds. The drive at this speed is very quiet and takes about double the time it does compared to the 40x. I don’t use CDRW media much but we will see later that it also does well in the real world testing.
