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, usually we would use a plextools installation disc, but the NEC ND-2500A refused to read this disc so we used the Pinnacle installation disc from the Plextor PX-708A package instead, notice that this disc is slightly longer than the plextools disc:

The drive reached its rated speed of 40X at the end and the average read speed is 31.00x. We compare it to other DVD-Writers in the table found below:

The drive did pretty well and is among the better drives, but the random seek time could have been better.

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.

It performed about average compared to the other writers, seek times is ok except Random seek which is a bit on the slow side.

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 is slightly lagging behind the other 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 did not read at full speed and it slowed down at the end, this may be cause by the disc we used though.

As we could see it's actually the third slowest drive, and the Random seek time is still higher than we like.

Below is the results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The drive performed a bit worse than expected in the burst mode test and got an average speed of 21.7x, in the secure mode test it also came out as one of the slower drives we have tested with an average speed of only 9x.

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.

There were some data errors that may cause problems when ripping music, and thus the drive got a Quality score of only 97.2. It doesn't support reading data from the lead-in and lead-out either.

Continue to the next page and read about DVD reading performance...