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This is the part of the review that you techies have scrolled all the way down to see isn’t it? It’s time to see what this drive has under the hood, and before we do that –here’s the factory specs, so you’ll know what Sony says it’s Spressa drive it supposed to do.

System Requirements:

PC: Pentium PC running 233 MHz or faster, 32 MB or RAM or more, Hard disk drive with sub 12 ms access time and sustained transfer rate 2,000 kb/s, Open 5.25-inch drive bay, Bus mastering EIDE connection, Windows 95/98/2000 or Windows NT 4.0 operating system*, Direct-X compatible soundcard

*Not all components of CD Complete Pro are compatible with Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0

Media & Modes Supported:

CD REWRITABLE (CD-RW), CD RECORDABLE (CD-R), CD-ROM, CD-Digital Audio, CD-Extra, CD TEXT, CD-ORM (Mode 1), CD-ROM XA (Mode 2, Form 1 & 2), CD-I (Mode 2, Form 1 & 2), CD-I Ready*, Photo CD (Single and multi-session), CD-Bridge, Video CD

12X Maximum Write speed
8X Maximum Re-write speed
32 X Maximum Read speed

4Meg Buffer
Data Transfer Rate of 4,800 kb/sec (Mode 1, 32X Speed)
Average Access time of 150 ms
100,000 MTBF

O-kay now that we have that taken care of –let’s talk a little about the drive itself. First of all I would like to mention something I have already talked about, which is the installation flyer included in the retail box. It’s funny to me that Sony would include a list of work-a-rounds for such a common problem like Buffer-underruns, and in the same breath boast about 12X write speeds. Companies like Plextor have not only increased drive speeds but they have backed up those speeds with reliability. Technology such as Burn-proof developed by Sanyo Corp. was showcased in a recent review of Plextors Plexwriter 12X drive. During that review, in all our testing not once did we have to slow write speeds down or shut of screensavers, ect… as Sony states needing to do before attempting a CD-writing session. It’s just a little disappointing that the speed is there with this drive (which will cost you more off the shelf) but the reliability isn’t! Read on to find out how the Sony drive stacks up when the rubber meets the road!

Benchmarks

For our test machine we used an Asus P3V133 running an Intel FC-PGA 566 Celeron CPU. It was equipped with 128 Megs of Micron memory and an IBM Deskstar 20 gig hard drive (in DMA mode). We ran CDTACH 98 and Sandra 2000 for our Read only marks then used three different write tests since there are actually three different tasks most people will perform with a CD-RW drive. First we wrote about 650 Megs of Data onto a 12X compatible CD-R using the CD Extreme software. Then we re-wrote the same 650 Megs onto a 10X compatible CD-RW disk –then overwrote the data again onto the CD-RW disk, so we would know just how fast it could re-write data. Also –we wanted to test the Mp3 music conversion process when creating a music CD so we chose about 15 tracks of Mp3 audio –adding up to about 71 minutes and wrote then into a 12X CD-R via the CD-Extreme software again. Here’s all the results compiled together starting with the Read-tests.