Acer CRW2010A IDE CDR-W - Page 5

CDR Tests - Page 1

The Acer 2010 is the fourth recorder, following Sanyo BP1500, Ricoh MP7200 and Ricoh MP9200 that supports Zone-CLV writing technology. However Acer's approach is much different than the one implemented by Sanyo/Ricoh's, thus forcing the drive to perform almost as slow as if it were a 16x CLV recorder. The drive uses Zone-CLV in order to achieve both 16x and 20x writing speeds. We used Nero CD Speed 0.83 build-in writing test in order to test the drive's writing performance at both 16x and 20x writing speeds:

As Nero CD Speed showed, the CRW2010 starts writing at 12x (CLV) and after 20mins jumps off to 16x (CLV) and continues to write at this speed until the end of the burn. The average writing speed of 16x (Zone-CLV) writing speed is around 14.98x(!) making the drive much slower than a real 16x (CLV) writer.

The same principles also apply for the 20x Zone-CLV writing speed. The drive starts writing at 12x (CLV), jumps to 16x (CLV) at 20min, climbs up to 20x (CLV) at 40min and continues to write at this speed until the end of the burn. The average writing speed of 20x (Zone-CLV) writing speed setting is around 16.87x making the drive much slower than the rest of the 20x available recorders:

Although Acer doesn't mention this in the drive specification, it supports a system similar to JustSpeed/FlexSS-BP, which examines the quality of the inserted medium and decides whether it is adequate for 16x and 20x writing speeds.

However it doesn't seem to work correctly, since it failed to recognize that Mitsui 74min (24x), Ricoh 74min & 80min (24x) and Taiyo Yuden 80min (24x) can be written at 20x. When one of the above mentioned media is being used, the drive reduces the recording speed to 16x and does not achieve the desired 20x writing speed (when using Nero). Acer did supplied us with Acer's 1-12x media, which also worked fine at 20x. That means possibly that the 20x writing speed has been optimized upon Acer's media and with newer firmware updates this will be improved.

There is also a possibility of the drive allowing over 16x writing speed, but needing a larger actual burning time! In our lab tests with Maxell 74mins media, the Acer 2010 drive allowed a 16x writing speed, but the actual time reached 6:54, which equals for 12x writing speed :(

- Procedure:

We tested the Acer 2010 with Nero v5.5.2.4, CloneCD v3.0.4.2 and Padus DJ v3.00.780 software. Notice that Padus 3.00.780 fails to identify the drive's writing speed capabilities correctly.

We used many different brands and types of media: Verbatim 16x, Mitsui 16x & 24x, Prodisc 16x, Ricoh 8x & 24x, TDK D-View 12x, Princo 16x, Maxell 16x, Taiyo Yuden 24x and Verbatim/TDK 74min HS-RW media.

- CD-R Tests:
We created a "DataCD" job with data slightly over 74mins (74:03:65). We burned the same job with all 4 CDR-W drives:

As you can see, the Acer 2010 needs the highest time to finish our burning task. The drive uses Zone-CLV for achieving 16x writing speed, which however is much slower than 16x CLV and P-CAV approaches by Ricoh and Yamaha. The drive is around 26 secs slower than Ricoh 9200 and 15secs than Yamaha 2200E. Also notice that the CPU usage is high - is this due to the Seamless-Link feature?

Let's see how the drives behave at 20x writing speed. The Acer 2010 is again the slowest among the 4 drives. The drive needs 53secs more than MP9200 and 35secs more than Yamaha 2200E. The actual time for 20x writing was 5:15mins, which is about the same time that a 16x CLV writer needs to finish the same task! Also the CPU Usage is again at high rates (27%).

- 80min CDs:
Since the Acer 2010 doesn't support overburning, we reduced our usual burning size, 80:01:47, to 79:54:26 in order to perform the 80min tests. The rest of the drives were measured on their normal (80:01:47) test capacity:

On this test the Acer 2010 needs 27secs more than the Ricoh MP9200A and 16secs more than the Yamaha 2200E to finish the task. As we can see, the time differences between the Acer 2010, Ricoh 9200 and Yamaha 2200 still remain for both 74 and 80min CDs.

At 20x writing speed we have the same results like the ones in our last test. The Acer 2010 needs 336secs to finish the task, 54sec more than the MP9200 and 30secs than the Yamaha 2200E.