detail information

During the review we've already seen that the TEAC CD-W540E is a great writer when it comes to CD-Recordable media but how does it perform with CD-ReWriteable media? To format our CD-RW discs we used Ahead's InCD version 3.24.3.

Formatting:

We formatted an Infiniti 700MB (!) CD-RW disc with Ahead's InCD and got a free useable disc space of 572MB. An increase of about 36MB compared to a normal 650MB CD-RW disc.

Infiniti 700MB CD-RW Disc 4x-10x Certified

Although the used CD-RW disc was certified up to 10x writing we had no problems using it at 12x.

Packet Writing:

Then we measured the time it took the TEAC CD-W540E to write a 411MB (431.036.416 bytes) file to the CD-RW disc with InCD. The file was copied in roughly 4 minutes and 32 seconds. About the same time as the Mitsumi CR-480ATE reached (4m:34s) and about one minute faster than 10x CD-RW recorders. The average writing speed of the TEAC CD-W540E was 10.32x compared to 10.24x of the Mitsumi CR-480ATE.

A lot faster than the average writing speeds of the Waitec MEGALUS (7.16x), the Lite-On 24102B (7.23x) and the Plextor PX-W2410A (7.20x). Please note that the Plextor and Lite-On speeds were reached on different machines so the achieved times can be a little off.

Normal Writing:

Next we used CloneCD to do a Quick Erase to clean the CD-RW disc and used Nero Burning Rom version 5.5.8.0 to write the same file as a normal data compilation. The disc was recognized as CD-R disc and the write speed was automatically set to 12x. Below a screenshot of the process completed successfully:

As you can see the process was finished in 4 minutes and 37 seconds, about the same results we got with the Packet Writing Tests above.

Mount Rainier Writing:

We have mentioned the new Mt. Rainier format a couple of times now but what does this mean? If you've read our description on page 3 you'll know that it means "native OS support of data storage on CD-RW". Great but the problem is that operating systems do not support this yet! So in the meantime we have to rely on third party software like InCD to write in the Mt. Rainier format. In this test we again used InCD v3.24.3 and formatted the disc in Mt. Rainier format.

When you have InCD installed and you view the properties of your CD-RW drive you will see a tab called 'InCD page-settings'. You will find the option to format into the Mt. Rainier format there if your drive supports it. Note that the screenshot on the right was done on a Dutch Windows version. The English translation is 'Format disc to CD-MRW'.

We currently have only two drives supporting the Mt. Rainier format: the TEAC CD-W540E and the Mitsumi CR-480ATE. Below we compare the write times when writing the same 411MB file as in our packet writing tests:

We will, for now, not go any deeper on how Mt. Rainier works exactly since Mt. Rainier was intended to be used without third party software like InCD. When operating systems start supporting Mt. Rainier like they should we can do more tests. For now we can only say the Mitsumi was faster than the TEAC writer.

Conclusion:

As with CD-Recordable media the TEAC CD-W540E also performs very well with CD-ReWriteable media. Because of its high re-write speeds of 12x it's a lot faster than 'normal' 10x drives we've previously reviewed. When comparing the drive to another 12x drive like the Mitsumi CR-480ATE the drive achieves about the same results. The Mitsumi was faster with Mt. Rainier writing but like said before we need to test this some more when operating systems really start supporting this. There's no point in reviewing something that hasn't been completely finished yet.

On the next page we've summed up our tests results with various media...