detail information

What's inside the box?

The drive we have is the bare OEM drive; it came in a static shielding bag without anything else than the drive. So we are only able to provide you with pictures of the drive itself:

The front of the drive is plain white and quite boring. The front of NEC drives have not changed much during the years, as we have seen some very old NEC CD-ROM's with about the same front.

Our drive was manufactured in December 2003 at a factory in Malaysia. The model as well as the FCC ID is also visible. On the bottom of the sticker you will find an explanation on the connectors on the back of the drive.

On the back of the drive you will find the usual connectors: Digital audio connector, analogue audio connector, pins and jumper to set the drive to master, slave or cable select, IDE connector and power connector.

Features and writing speed:

We quickly installed the drive without any problems and fired up Nero Info Tool to get an idea of which features this drive supports:

Our drive came shipped with firmware 1.05. While reviewing this drive a newer firmware (version 1.06) was released. Some of the tests are done with firmware 1.05 but most are done with firmware 1.06, if there were room for improvement we re-ran the test with 1.06 to see if this improved the performance.

The drive supports almost everything but we miss the support for Mount Rainier. We do also prefer a larger buffer than 2Mb.

And another shot from Nero Burning ROM:

We do not really find anything alarming here either, but a larger buffer and Mount Rainier support would have been nice.

Now it's time to take a closer look at the write technology used by the NEC ND-2500A:

CD-Recordable:

The drive uses Z-CLV(Zone-Constant Linear Velocity) to write at its maximum speed of 32X. The drive wrote the last zone at 32X and this gives an average speed of 27.16x. Let us compare this to another drive in the same generation; the Plextor PX-708A:

As we could see the Plextor uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) writing strategy to reach it rated speed of 40X. This gives an average speed of 33.38x.

In practical use this means that the NEC ND-2500A uses about 40seconds more to write a full 80min CD-R disc compared to the Plextor PX-708A.

CD-ReWritable:

As we could see the NEC ND-2500A uses CLV(Constant Linear Velocity) write method to write at its rated speed of 16X for Ultra speed CD-RW, Again we compare it to the Plextor PX-708A:

The Plextor PX-708A with its P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) writespeed of 24X for Ultra Speed CD-RW discs is for sure faster than the NEC ND-2500A.

In practical use this means that the NEC ND-2500A is about 1 minute and 47 seconds slower at writing a full 80min Ultra speed CD-RW disc compared to the Plextor PX-708A.

8X DVD-Writing speed:

The NEC ND-2500A uses Z-CLV(Zone-Constant Linear Velocity). The first zone from 0-0,8Gb is done at 4x speed, the next zone from 0,8Gb to 2,2Gb is done at 6x speed and the last zone from 2,2Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x. This gives an average speed of 6.80x. The speed is the same for both DVD-R and DVD+R discs. Let us once again compare this to the Plextor PX-708A:

The Plextor PX-708A also uses Z-CLV(Zone-Constant Linear Velocity), but only two zones compared to three zones for the NEC ND-2500A. The first zone from 0-0,7Gb is done at 6x speed; the next zone from 0,7Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x speed. This gives an average speed of 7.69x, making the Plextor PX-708A about 0.9x faster than the NEC ND-2500A for a full 4,38Gb disc.

In practical use this means that the NEC ND-2500A needs about 1minute and 30seconds more to write a full 4.38Gb disc at 8X compared to the Plextor PX-708A, but the NEC ND-2500A have the advantage of also writing DVD-R discs at 8X, while the Plextor PX-708A only writes DVD+R discs at 8X.

Now that we have finished examining the drive and its writing strategies it's time to head on to next page, which is reading performance test…