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 supports:

DVD-ROM : 8x

CD-ROM : 24x 

Pressed discs:

For this test we used a pressed CD-ROM disc that is close to 74 minutes long. Below you will see the produced result:

The NEC ND-7551A reached 25.14x.

CD-Recordable Discs:

The disc we used was a Verbatim 52X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation. 

 CD-Rewritable discs:

This time we used a Traxdata 8X-24X CD-RW disc.

Audio – Digital Audio Extraction:

We 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 76 minutes long (76:01:52).

Below is the results produced by EAC:

 Burst mode

 Secure mode

The drive performed well in burst and slower in secure mode.

Advanced audio – DAE quality test:

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

The extracting quality is excellent and it should support everything, except reading the Leadin / Leadout. However the drive was not able to copy on the fly at 12x or 16x.

DVD reading performance:

Again, we will use Nero CD-Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs. The drive should read pressed single layer DVD-discs at 8X.

DVD – DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with a single and Double 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.

DVD-Video Single Layer

 
DVD-Video Double Layer

Although CD-Speed says DVD-ROM for the single layer disc, it actually is a pressed video DVD. As we can see the drive reached 5x on DVD-Video Single and Double layer.

DVD – DVD+R/RW:

For this test we used a Verbatim 16X DVD+R and a Traxdata 8X DVD+RW with about 4.4Gb of data. Below are the results:

DVD+R

 
DVD+RW

The drive had no problems reaching 8x reading speed on DVD+R/RW. Now let us see how it will perform on DVD-R/RW.

DVD – DVD-R/RW:

For this test we used a Datawrite 8X DVD-R disc and a Verbatim 6X DVD-RW disc filled with about 4.4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

DVD-R

DVD-RW

There are hardly any differences in the speed, compared to reading the DVD+R/RW discs.

Overall thoughts:

The NEC ND-7551A is a very good reader but limits the read speed on video DVD.

But now it’s time to head on to a more interesting part: Writing CD-R and CD-RW discs…

Features

CD-R/RW Writing performance