detail information

Reading performance:

For these tests we will use Nero CD/DVD-Speed to read various CD and DVD's, including audio discs and DVD-media. As already mentioned in the introduction this drive sports a specified read speed of 12X for DVD's and 40X for CD's.

Pressed discs:

For this test we used a pressed CD-ROM disc containing PlexTools v1.08 that is exactly 74 minutes long. Below you will see the produced result:

The drive reached its rated speed of 40X at the end and the average read speed is 30.83x. We compare it to other DVD-Writers in the table found below:

The drive did pretty well and is in the middle of the pack for both speed and seek times.

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 CD. The disc we used was a Verbatim 48X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals corporation.

Nothing changes here and the result is about identical to reading the pressed disc. The usual comparison table is found below.

Compared to the other drives capable of reading at 40x speed it came out slightly slower, but not much. Seek times is acceptable compared to the other drives.

CD-ReWritable discs:

Again we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 disc, this time we used a Verbatim High Speed (10X) CD-RW disc made by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

The drive is locked at 32X reading speed for CD-RW discs; look below to see how this compares to other drives:

It came out as one of the slowest drives, due to higher seek times and lower reading speed. That sounds logical, doesn't it? :)

Audio - Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the Mediagear we again used Nero CD/DVD-Speed to measure the transfer rate. The audio disc we used is slightly larger than the disc used for the other tests, to be exact it's about 78 minutes long (77:56:57).

The drive had no problems with reading the audio disc at full speed.

The drive did very well and came out as one of the better drives.

Below is the results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The drive performed as expected in the burst mode test, but it was very slow in the secure mode test and is actually among the slower drives for secure extraction.

Advanced audio - DAE quality test:

Before we move on to testing DVD read speeds we will take a last audio test, this time we used the 'Advanced DAE Quality Test" feature in CD-Speed.

We can't find anything to complain about as the quality score is perfect and everything is supported.

That was all the CD-Reading tests, DVD-reading tests are found at next page...