ASUS CRW-4012A-U: High Speed Mobile Burning

Benchmark

For our benchmark of the ASUS CRW-4012A-U, we ran 4 intensive tests on the drive and the media bundled with the drive.  The tests were all performed on the following testbed with no programs running other than Nero CDSpeed and Nero Burning ROM.  The following is a breakdown of our testbed:

In order to test the drive, we will use the most versatile and widely used benchmarking suites for CDs.  There are several intensive tests inside CDSpeed that we will be using.  The first test is on a 12X rated ASUS CDRW bundled with the drive.  The second test will be using the ASUS 40X CDR media bundled with the drive in order to test the maximum write speed of the drive.  Our third test will include an overburn examination of the bundled media.  The last and probably most informative test is the maximum data read speeds from the drive.  Remember, the drive is rated at 48X read.

Even from these four tests we were able to learn a lot about the drive.  As expected, the 12X CDRW performance was on par with the box specifications.  By following the top green line, we see the drive hovers around 12X the whole write.  More interesting is the second test, the Max burn speed test.  As you can see, the burn is actually split up into four steps (zones) each of increasing speed until the final write speed of 40X is obtained.  To some the idea of a 40X burner only burning at 40X for some of the time may come as a shock.  The important thing here is the types of read/writes that are occurring.

CLV – Constant Linear Velocity – The disk is reading or writing at a constant speed.

Z-CLV – Zone Constant Linear Velocity – The disk is reading or writing at constant speeds for various periods of time in “zones.”  This is only used for a disk being written to.

CAV – Constant Angular Velocity – The disk is written or read at a constantly increasing speed.

With that little bit of terminology, we can see that the CDRW is written at CLV.  Our CDR burn of 40X looks like it was written at a 4 zone Z-CLV.  Notice a 40X CLV would have been significantly faster than a 40X Z-CLV.  However, due to limitations of the ASUS CRW-4012A-U, this is not possible.  We see from the benchmark that the average speed of the drive was closer to 30X; therefore the performance of our 40X Z-CLV is on par with that of a 30X CLV burner.  Remember, CD/R/RW and DVD/R/RW drives are measured by the peak velocity.  So even though our drive only performed the 40X burn for less than a quarter of the entire process, it still performed as advertised.

The final test, the read test performed on a CAV level; the drive eventually peaked at 46.43X.  This is somewhat lower than the advertised read peak of 48X.  Also notice the seek times on the top right of the Data CD Read Test.  Typically, read times are advertised on the “1/3 seek time” because those are the lowest. Note that our 4012A-U has an advertised seek time of 100ms.  From our read test we never saw the seek dip below 115ms. 

Surprisingly, even with the DDSS II technology, the unit was fairly loud.  The unit droned out our fans while spinning up, reading, and writing.  We would like to see more drive manufacturers look into this as this is becoming an ever increasing problems as drives get faster.  Fortunately, because of the rubber soled feet on the unit, we did not get any vibration on the workbench the drive was sitting on.