Performance
Reading CD-ROM Media
Here's
the drive doing exactly what it was designed to do: reading a DVD disc. The disc
of choice here is "The Mummy". While it is unnecesary to use a CD-ROM
benchmarking application to show DVD reading performance I thought I'd throw that
in considering the results that will follow shortly. One thing I'd like to point
out is the very flat performance curve that the unit displayed. I asked Eric Lin
of EPO about that and he explained that the player is designed not to exceed 4X
speed while playing a movie since that would create a lot of drive noise, and
would shorten the life of the drive. I'll assure you there were no skips or pauses
during movie playback, even with dirty disks. All will go very will if the torque
curve for the engine I'm building for my '67 Mustang Fastback is this flat. The
1/3 seek time appears to be way off what some of my other tests got, but the 82
ms random seek time is pretty good, and under the 85 ms EPO spec.
Here's
the EPO 10X drive reading a data disk. The disk of choice was a Windows 98 setup
disk. Take a look at a couple of things here. Once again we get that flat performance
curve. One thing that can kill optical read performance are large dips in the
performance curve. Ideally you'd like to see a curve that steadily rises, but
a flat line at least means you won't have tremendous performance loss. I didn't
test the unit with an 8x burner, but I'm leaning to keeping this drive with a
4X or 6X max burner at this point with its overall 20.00X average read speed.
I'd like to see the performance above 30X or at least 26X before I stick it as
the source for an 8X burner. If any of you have had experience with this drive
and an 8X or faster burner let me know and I'll gladly update the information
here. Since it is primarily designed for CD-ROM media I'm not too worried as a
steady 20x performance result is quite acceptable. One thing that really surprised
me was how high the CPU usage was for these tests.
