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When a new piece of hardware hits the shelf, I tend to look at it from
one perspective -- "What exactly is this going to do for my game play?"
Low and behold, when DVD technology was first put into a 5¼ inch drive
bay, the game vendors all promised "This technology will make leaps and
bounds over present CD-ROM media and could possibly even lower the cost
of individual software packages." The foremost idea being it would be
more efficient to place only one disc in the box instead of making a
larger protective binder and ship multiple CDs. From the viewpoint of
the user, we would only need to install and play the game from one
single DVD! No more playing Human Disc Drive during installation or having your momentum halted during level changes to Please Insert The CD Labeled Disc 2 into Drive E. Just how much penetration HAS the DVD made in the software world? Really?? The catch phrase that the game industry has latched onto has been Releasing the software in a DVD format in large quantities is not economically feasible at this point. I heard that same line about five years ago when a 24x CD-ROM drive was king. Ok, there have been a few selected releases such as Baldur's Gate, a huge 6 CD role playing game that does have the luxury of cutting the disc count down to 1 in a DVD. So why the big push to put a DVD in our machine?
Aside from the fascination that some folks may have with watching a feature movie on a 19 inch monitor, DVD drives offer some very good performance stats when used as a CD-ROM drive. Assuming for a moment that one day, we will actually be able to purchase retail software packages on a DVD, the price difference between a DVD-ROM drive and a CD-ROM drive isn't staggering enough to completely negate the idea of using a DVD drive.
The 16x DVD drive I have to torture test today is from Toshiba, model SM-1612. ►
2x DVD-RAM playback This Toshiba SM-1612 is compatible with CloneCD RAW-DAO read methods making this drive suitable as a read unit in your backup operations. Using an 80 minute DATA CD and an average retail AUDIO CD, Nero CD-SPEED was used to range and scope the drives transfer and seek times. Ultra DMA mode 2 was verified active on the IDE channel the DVD drive was attached to. The green lines in the chart below represent the data stream speed and the yellow line represents the rotational speed (in RPM) of the disc.
Good numbers and outstanding data throughput climb expectedly at the outer edges of thee CD. Starting a CD read at 21x is good, ending it at 48x is better! Random seek time of 89ms isn't far off the 85ms claim made from Toshiba. CPU Utilization rates leveled off nice and low beyond the 4x CAV rate of the drive. A 1 Megabyte burst rate is very typical for IDE CD-ROM drives, so no big suprise there. And now for our Digital Audio Extraction tests. The CD Speed program also judges how effectively a drive can read and extract digital audio from a disc.
Here we can see the drive start to trip a little bit. Speeds at the beginning of the CD are noticeable slower, starting at only 13x and ending at 30x. This is fairly quick and should not make the task of MP3 rips any more painful than it already is. The Random seek time is almost as slow as molasses but thankfully data on an AUDIO CD is almost perfectly sequential. Jumping from track to track may slow things down a bit, but no more-so than if you were using a dedicated Audio CD Player. CPU Utilization at higher speed ratings is certainly a factor. There won't be any game playing going on while the Toshiba is ripping off an MP3, probably the most your system could endure during the operation would be some limited web surfing. Nero CD Speeds gives this drive a 10 on Digital Audio Extraction quality! Folks with dark colored cases who want to avoid putting white drives in their system should find special appreciation for this unit. Koolcases will only ask for $75 US dollars and will include an analog audio cable and the software WinDVD player. Considering all that the Toshiba drive can bring to the table, it certainly is hard to pass up. Rock Solid CD-ROM performance and very adequate DAE capabilities make this a total all-in-one solution. While I would like to say that the DVD portion of the drive works just as well, I was unable to complete any tests using conventional DVD movie discs. The copy protection/encryption make even a read test in benchmarking impossible. However, DVD movie playback using WinDVD is flawless. Scan/fast-forward and review/rewind features all work with only the expected amount of video frame stutter. All in all I consider this drive a very safe buy and would recommend it to system builders seeking a dependable optical storage medium.
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