This nifty, free utility is the secret to our optical drive reviews
When testing hardware, it’s critical to eliminate as many variables as possible. That’s why when I review optical drives, I eschew the applications that come with the drives and turn to Nero CD-DVD Speed. The utility comes bundled with the Nero ToolKit Utility Suite, but it can also be downloaded for free at www.cdspeed2000.com. It’s updated on a regular basis to keep up with new hardware, and it supports all types of CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and HD DVD media. In the course of evaluating a drive, I’ll first use Nero CD-DVD Speed to create a data disc. As the utility goes about filling the disc, a graph displays the drive’s progress—what percentage of the disc has been filled, at what speed the data is being written, and even the write speed in relation to the disc’s rotation speed. Once the write is complete, I conduct a read test, and following that, Nero generates a report detailing everything from average read/write speeds, to seek times, to spin times, to CPU usage, In other words, a very thorough picture of a drive’s abilities. I’ve found that often the software that comes bundled with a drive yields slightly better performance than Nero’s app does—a Blu-ray drive might write to BD-R at +/- 46 minutes using CDDVD Speed and +/- 44 minutes using Cyberlink’s software. But my verdicts are based on the relative performance of the hardware itself, and I can only determine that by using the same application across the board. And, the big benefit of CD-DVD Speed is that it offers an amazing amount of granular detail.
When testing hardware, it’s critical to eliminate as many variables as possible. That’s why when I review optical drives, I eschew the applications that come with the drives and turn to Nero CD-DVD Speed. The utility comes bundled with the Nero ToolKit Utility Suite, but it can also be downloaded for free at www.cdspeed2000.com. It’s updated on a regular basis to keep up with new hardware, and it supports all types of CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and HD DVD media. In the course of evaluating a drive, I’ll first use Nero CD-DVD Speed to create a data disc. As the utility goes about filling the disc, a graph displays the drive’s progress—what percentage of the disc has been filled, at what speed the data is being written, and even the write speed in relation to the disc’s rotation speed. Once the write is complete, I conduct a read test, and following that, Nero generates a report detailing everything from average read/write speeds, to seek times, to spin times, to CPU usage, In other words, a very thorough picture of a drive’s abilities. I’ve found that often the software that comes bundled with a drive yields slightly better performance than Nero’s app does—a Blu-ray drive might write to BD-R at +/- 46 minutes using CDDVD Speed and +/- 44 minutes using Cyberlink’s software. But my verdicts are based on the relative performance of the hardware itself, and I can only determine that by using the same application across the board. And, the big benefit of CD-DVD Speed is that it offers an amazing amount of granular detail.
