Performance
Lets cut to through the fog, and see how well this drive does in the performance arena. Since we did have to slow the actual CD-write time back to 8X in our tests, we are expecting to see lower marks for the HP.
As a reminder-
The machine in the test consists of the following-
Abit KA7 motherboard BIOS date 7/20/2000
AMD Athlon 600 MHZ CPU
256 MEGS Micron PC100 RAM
Promise Fasttrack 66 with two Western Digital 7200RPM drives configured in a RAID 0
Matrox G200 AGP video card
Lite-on 48X CD-ROM drive (UDMA mode4 with 80 wire cable)
SoundBlaster Live! Audio card
For benchmarking I used three different scales since there are three different speeds at which the drive actually performs.
For reading I used CD TACH from Testa Labs
For writing I used whatever burning software the drive came with -beefed up with every optimal factory setting available and burned a complete CD consisting of 621 MEGS of data, and timed the burn. I also did a timed CD-copy from the Lite-On CD-ROM to the CD-RW drive in test.
For re-writing, I first wrote the same 621 MEGS of data onto a 4X CD-RW disk and timed the write. Then I erased the disk and timed the results of that as well.
Read Speeds -
Write speeds
621 MEGS of Data in 5 Minutes
71 Minutes of MP3 to CD Audio in 7 minutes (actual wav to cd audio) add 15 minutes for having to manually convert the MP3 files TOTAL TIME as 22 minutes.
CD to CD no hard disk copy first (Office 2000 Disk one 502 MEGS) in 7 minutes
Re-write speeds -
(4X) 621 MEGS of data 18 Minutes
Erasing a CD-RW disk (quick format) 48 seconds
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