Top 5 CD-RW Drives

How We Test

We test CD-RW drives on a Micron Millennia Celeron-400 system with a Western Digital Caviar 13GB hard drive and 64MB of RAM. We install an IDE CD-RW drive as the master on the secondary channel. If a vendor doesn't provide its own SCSI card, we install an Adaptec 2906 SCSI adapter for use in our tests. Each CD-RW kit is installed according to the vendor's instructions in the quick-start section of the manual.

To return the test PC to its original condition before each test, we restore an image created with PowerQuest's Drive Image software. We then install the CD-RW drive to be evaluated, noting any difficulties, and then load the bundled software for CD-R and CD-RW writing.

We gauge CD-ROM read performance by using Testa Labs' CD Tach 98 2.0 software and by installing Microsoft's Office 2000 suite in its default configuration. To determine CD-R write performance, we burn 430MB of data to CD-R both from an image file and on the fly. We test CD-R read performance by reading the 430MB back to the hard drive.

We test digital audio extraction speed by extracting a 250MB audio track from an audio CD (Beethoven's Eroica Variations Opus 35) to the hard drive. We also write the track back to a fresh CD-R, and listen to determine whether noise or other sonic artifacts have been introduced.

To test CD-RW packet-writing performance, we copy a folder containing 100MB of files to a CD-RW disc twice. First we copy the folder to the newly formatted blank disc, and then we overwrite the folder by copying it a second time to the disc without deleting the original copy.