Teac CDW552E CDRW Drive

The Teac CD-W552E 52x24x52 CD-RW Drive
Pushing the CD-R Limits

By, Jeff Bouton
August 7th, 2003

HotHardware Test Systems It's Snappy

CD-ROM Performance Tests - Teac CD-W552E Speeding Things Along

Nero InfoTool & Sandra MAX3!

To start things off we loaded Nero InfoTool to take a look at the drive's feature set.  To give a frame of reference, we compared the Teac CD-W552E to the popular Plextor PX-W4012A.  Essentially the main difference between the two drives is drive speed, cache size and support for Mount Rainer.  While the Teac drive is clearly the faster of the two, it only has half the cache of the Plextor, weighing in at 2MB.  When it comes to performance, we like to see a larger cache size, although 2MB should be sufficient and will help keep the cost of the drive at competitive levels.  The TEAC CD-W552E drive also supports Mount Rainier, a technology developed by Philips.  Mount Rainer enables native support for data storage on CD-RW discs, letting the disk behave much like a floppy disk.  If you want to learn more, check out the the Mt Rainer website for details.

Nero InfoTool - Teac CD_W552E	Nero InfoTool - Plextor PlexWriter PX-W4012A
Teac CD_W552E - Sandra MAX3!	Plextor PlexWriter PX-W4012A - Sandra MAX3!

To give us a quick gauge of read performance, we loaded a CD with one 698MB AVI file into each drive and launched SiSoft Sandra MAX3!  This is a good, quick way to give us an idea of what to expect in read performance.  During the test the Teac drive averaged 19X read speeds while the Plextor hit 17X, a narrow margin for the two.  Next we'll get a little more physical with each drive, running several other handy testing applications from Ahead Software.

Ahead software, the makers of Nero Burning ROM, have an excellent selection of free utilities to test the functions of various types of optical drives.  Each of these small applications perform a number of specific tasks that shows us what each drive is capable of.  In this next section we ran several of these tests on the Teac CD-W552E and included the results of a  Plextor PX-W4012A drive for comparison.  Please note that in each test, the Green line represents Transfer Rates while the Yellow Line represents Rotation Speed.

Nero CD Speed

The first test, Nero CD Speed, runs a full spectrum of diagnostics to assess the drive's overall efficiency. 
 

Teac CD-W552E

Plextor PlexWriter PX-W4012A

It was no surprise to see the Teac drive did peak at 52X during the test, while averaging over 39X.  Compared to the Plextor drive, the Teac showed increased CPU utilization adding a slight 1 point increase with the 4X and 8X test.  Interestingly, with the overall better performance of the Teac drive with higher speeds and faster seek times than the Plextor drive, the burst rate of the drive was actually 1MB less Vs the Plextor.  This is most likely due to the smaller cache and possible slower memory used.

One last thing to point out is the CD spin-up time of the drive.  One of the biggest issues with Plextor drives is their spin-up times from the point the CD tray closes to the time the CD is readable in Windows.  The Plextor drive took over 9 seconds to complete while the Teac was far more efficient at 1.70 seconds.

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