Testing & Results

Testing Methodology

The nero8 Essentials program that comes bundled with the ASUS DRW-24B1ST 24x DVD Burner has a benchmarking tool built into it called Nero Disc Speed 4. This nifty little tool will help you to take a comparative look at your optical drive by measuring quite a few of the functions of the drive. We will be using Nero Disc Speed 4 exclusively in this section to test the DRW-24B1ST against three other drives, another SATA drive, an IDE drive, and an external USB 2.0 drive. This will give us an idea of speed benefit that the ASUS DRW-24B1ST has over it's competitors.

Test System

• Motherboard: MSI P965 NEO LGA775
• System Memory: 2 x 2GB DDR2 800 (PC6400)
• Processor: Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo E6300 1.8Ghz
• Audio: Creative Labs SB Audigy
• Video: MSI NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX+
• Disk Drive 1: Western Digital 7200RPM 3.0Gb/s 160Gb SATA
• Disk Drive 2: Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 3.0Gb/s 1.5Tb SATA
• Enclosure: NZXT Gamma Black
• PSU: 550W ATX
• Monitor: Acer X233Hbid 23" HDMI
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64bit
• Optical Drive 1: ASUS DRW-24B1ST 24x DVD+-RW SATA
• Optical Drive 2: MAD DOG 16X3DVD9 16X DVD+-RW IDE
• Optical Drive 3: Panasonic UJ-875A 8X DVD+-RW SlimDrive SATA
• Optical Drive 4: LiteOn eSAU208 8X DVD+-RW External USB 2.0

Results

This first screenshot is from the Nero Disc Speed 4 software. It shows the results of all the benchmarking that the program ran. As you see, the ASUS DRW-24B1ST started the testing at over 6X and made it up to 16X during the course of testing. We will go into more detail about the speeds later on.

First off, we'll compare the access times of the different test drives against the DRW-24B1ST. The access time measures how long it takes the optical head to find a specific point on disc and be able to recognize information on that area of the disc. It encompasses the seek time (finding the location) and the time it takes to read the information off that location. As you can see below, the seek times are all pretty fast, but the ASUS DRW-24B1ST beats out the pack by accessing a random location on the disc in under 1 second. Of course, the difference between 99 milliseconds and the slowest 118 milliseconds from the external drive is really immeasurable.

Next we take a look at the CPU usage of each of the drives we tested. The CPU usage test measures what percentage of the CPU is used by the drive at 1X, 2X, 4X at 8X. I've omitted 1X on the chart below because the results at that speed are really negligible. It is not a surprise that the LiteOn drive uses the highest percentage of the CPU. Being an external USB 2.0 drive, I was expecting that. I was a little surprised that it used almost all of the CPU at 8X. Don't expect to be using your system much while this LiteOn External drive is burning at full speed. All of the other drives are very similar in terms of CPU usage, and you probably won't notice a difference between any of them.

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