Top 5 CD-RW Drives

How We Test

We test CD-RW drives on a Dell Dimension 4100 Pentium III-933 system with a 20GB hard drive and 128MB of RAM. The system runs Windows 98 SE.

We install an IDE CD-RW drive as the slave on the secondary channel. If the drive is a SCSI drive and the vendor doesn't provide a SCSI card, we install an Adaptec 2906 SCSI adapter for use with the drive. For IEEE 1394 drives, if the vendor doesn't provide a card, we install a Belkin IEEE 1394 FireWire PCI Card.

We install each CD-RW kit according to the vendor's instructions in the quick-start section of the manual. If the drive's manual does not specify that we should enable Windows' Direct Memory Access settings (which can boost a drive's performance), we leave DMA disabled.

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 anything unusual, and then install and load the bundled software for CD-R and CD-RW writing.

We gauge CD-ROM read performance by installing Microsoft's Office 2000 Small Business Edition (disc 1) in its default configuration. To determine CD-R write performance, we burn 650MB of data to CD-R, both from an ISO 9660 image file and on the fly.

We also test digital audio extraction speed by extracting 320MB of audio tracks from an audio CD to the hard drive.

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 a newly formatted blank disc. We delete the folder when the copy's done, and then we copy the folder to the disc a second time, as you would do if you were rewriting to a disc.