Test Method:
- SCSI Mechanic v3.0 & CD Speed 99 v0.80 Tests: With these tests we attempted to measure the I/O performance of Iomega's Predator CDRW drive. Because of the drive's nature, we didn't perform any comparisons to other various CDR-W drives. We believe that it's obvious why...

- SCSI Mechanic v3.0 results:

The Iomega's Predator CDRW performed pretty good for an 6x Reader on the USB port. The drive gave us the best score in "Average Sequential I/O" test results. In the "Average Same Sector I/O" tests the drive didn't perform so well, not due to it's internal cache, but because of the USB speed-limit.

- CD Speed 99 results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)

The CD Speed 99 results confirmed our previous tests results. The drive gave back a high average reading speed mark (6.44x) which it's remarkable once it's named speed is only 6x.

The seek times of Iomega's Predator are a nice surprise. It manages to compete -and beat- drives like the Yamaha 2100s (126ms), or even the Plexwriter PX-W1610A (135ms) in the Random I/O seek time! This also happens more or less to the 1/3 tests. The drive is a great performer in this test.

- CD-R Media / Overburning tests

We burned a CD-R media with data up to 700Mb (80min CDR) but not through CD Speed. The program/drive combination was unable to operate properly with any CDRs over 74:00 mins; more, it failed to complete the write tests of CD Speed on ANY media. (See the picture).

We have made it though using Nero 5.5.2.4. and an 80:00min CDR. Even then, there was no possibility to overburn over just 1 sec above 80:00 mins.

We have contacted the author of CDSpeed, Erik Deppe who was very helpful and stated that the particular drive may be using the Philips mechanism which means that "...the recording tests are not (yet) supported because they need a special mode to write..."

After a couple of days we received a new version (0.83 beta) of CDSpeed, which supported the overburning feature of the drive. We managed to overburn up to 91:25 mins using a TraxData 16x, 80min media, but at that point the drive failed to complete the test and we had to reboot the computer in order to override the situation. The drive also failed (under any circumstances) to recognize the 90min and 99min CDR media. :-(