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 32X for CD's. 

Pressed discs:

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

The drive reached its rated speed of 32X at the end of the disc with an average speed of 24,82X. How this compares to other DVD-Recorders you may see in the table below:

With a read speed of only 32X it falls behind the two others drives when it comes to speed. It was a bit disappointing to see that the seek times were also far from as good as from the other two drives.

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 CD. The disc we used was a Plextor 48X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Taiyo Yuden.

As we can see from this screenshot the drive passed its rated speed of 32X by even more than with the original CD-ROM disc and reaching a total of 33,79X with an average speed of 25,48X. Below is a comparison table where it's compared to other DVD-Writers:

Again the drive is lagging behind the two other DVD-Writers due to its read speed of only 32X. And for the seek times it is still lagging behind the other two drives.

CD-ReWritable discs:

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

As with the other discs it passed the 32X mark and reached a total of 33,79X and an average speed of 25,48X. Look below for a comparison table with two other DVD-Writers:

As the table shows it's still lagging behind, although not by much compared to the Plextor PX-504A, seek times is a different story and there is still a gap between the Memorex Dual-X and the two other drives.

Audio - Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the Memorex 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 (77:56:58).

The drive supports reading audio at full 32X speed, and is topping out at 33,29X with an average speed of 25,24X. Below there's a comparison table: 

Again it's limited by its read speed of only 32X and thus lags behind the other drives, although not far behind the Plextor PX-504A.

And as a last test we used Exact Audi Copy (EAC) to extract the audio to our hard drive. According to EAC the Memorex supports caching and accurate stream, but lacks the support for retrieving C2 errors.

Below is results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The drive performed as expected in the burst mode test and reached a top speed of 33,5X. But for the secure mode test it was only able to read at an average speed of 5,4X.

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.

The Memorex is able to do on the fly copying at speeds up to 12X and supports reading subchannel data and CD-Text. On the other hand it can't read data from the lead out and lead in. The drive is also good at reading audio since it reached a perfect score of 100.0

DVD - DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with a single and dual layered DVD video discs. While only 1X speed is required to watch DVD movies, it's useful to be able to read the discs at higher speeds if you're going to extract (rip) the content of the disc to your hard drive. Notice: Even if these discs contains DVD-Video they are identified as DVD-ROM discs for a reason or another, it's a disc issue and not a drive issue, we did several tests and this do not seem to affect the results of the tests in any way.

The Memorex read our single layer DVD at full speed, although with a few slowdowns at the end. For the dual layer disc it did not read it at full speed and it slowed down even more after the layer change. Let us sum up the results in a comparison table with other DVD-Writers:

Finally the Memorex Dual-X begins to show its strengths by beating the other drives in both tests.

DVD - DVD+R(W): 

For this test we used an Arita 4X DVD+R and the included Memorex DVD+RW with about 4,4Gb of data. Below are the results:

While the drive did not read the discs at full speed it did read them without any problems. Let us compare the result with other drives and see how it compares to those:

Again Memorex beats the other drives without problems.

DVD - DVD-R/RW:

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For this test we used a Princo 4X DVD-R disc and an Princo 2X DVD-RW disc filled with about 4,4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

As we could see out from these graphs, the drive performed nearly the same with DVD-R/RW discs as with DVD+R/RW discs, we did only get a slight slowdown on the end of the DVD-RW media (most likely due to our cheap princo DVD-RW disc). Below is a comparison table, notice that there are no results for the Plextor reading DVD-RW as it refused to read the disc (gave back an media error).

As with the DVD+R/RW discs, the drive outperformed the other drives when reading DVD-R/RW discs.

Head on to next page and find out about the writing performance of this drive...